RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken and held in Russian controlled territory.

NEWS ARCHIVE: A new report accusing Russia of abducting thousands of Ukrainian children in a massive re-education effort to support Putin’s aims…

NEWS ARCHIVE 2: The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his children’s commissioner accusing them of war crimes over the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine…

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Children of Ukraine is a new documentary from Frontline examining the plight of these children.

PAUL KENYON: Do you remember what happened when you were in the car where the loud gunshots happened?

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Paul Kenyon directed and produced the film. In Ukraine, he met families desperate for answers and teens who escaped Russian custody. And he followed investigators as they worked to track down missing children and document what happened.

IPHR volunteer: We’re still hoping to bring them back home. They are still our children.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: He joined me to talk about making this documentary. I’m Raney Aronson Rath, Editor in Chief and Executive Producer of Frontline, and this is the Frontline Dispatch.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Paul, thanks so much for joining me on The Dispatch.

PAUL KENYON: It’s good to be with you.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, let’s start with how you became interested in the story. Take me back to when you first heard about what was happening and why you decided to take on the story.

PAUL KENYON: I’ve been going to Ukraine since 2014. So I was in Crimea when the Russians came and, um, and, and took over Crimea. Um, and then I spent a lot of time in Donetsk and Luhansk after that. So I have a long history of going to Ukraine and I was there at the beginning of the, the war in 2022, so in February. So, I spent a lot of time in Ukraine, traveling to the front, making documentaries. And, um, this was a story that a number of people had been speaking about as a possibility and saying that children had been disappearing from children’s homes and from boarding schools and being taken across the border into Russian-held territory. In fact, I’ve got to be absolutely clear, these stories started coming out shortly after 2014. So there were people even then who said, In the area of Donbass that has been taken over by Russia, children are taken, without their parents authority, to camps in Russian held territory. Um, the parents are sometimes told, if you don’t agree, bad things will happen to you. Um, if you don’t agree, we will take the children anyway. These were the kind of stories that we’d been hearing for a while, but it was always going to be difficult to prove. Anyway, in 2022, when the war started, as the Russians took territory in the east of Ukraine, more of these stories started to surface. And then as the tide, if you like, retreated and the Russians were pushed back and the Ukrainians liberated their lands. These stories became more doable because then you could go and talk to families who would say, my children were at a camp when the war started, we’ve not seen them since. My child was at school when the war started, we’ve not seen them since. So then it began to take shape and we were able to go and investigate properly.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Paul, one of the first stories we hear about in the film is just- it’s truly unforgettable. It’s about a little boy named Max who’s been missing for more than two years by the time you’re filming. Tell us about Max and his family.

PAUL KENYON: So Max is a little boy who was three years old at the beginning of the war in 2022 and was living in Mariupol with his mother and with his father, um, and his little brother and sister. And then the war started and they needed to get out. And getting out was the moment where their lives changed forever because as they were trying to get out in the car with their grandparents, suddenly they came around a bend in Mariupol. and a group of soldiers opened fire and many people in the car were killed. And, uh, at the beginning it was thought Max had been killed. So there he is, this little baby. We think he was found under the body of his mum, who sadly was killed. So the mother was killed. The grandfather was killed. Um, and little Max, they thought he was dead at the beginning. He was wounded. But when Ukrainian soldiers managed to get him out of the car, they realized, in fact, he was still alive. And that’s when the mystery really began. When the little boy, Max, ended up at the hospital with, we think, his father, at that point they lost contact with him. Nobody knows what happens. And within that two or three day period is when the Russians were taking over Mariupol and took over the hospitals.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So in the hospital, tthe father is there. Tell me about the state of his father at this time.

PAUL KENYON: We think the father was seriously injured, but not life threateningly so. And then everything becomes fuzzy. So um, nobody knows where Max is and nobody knows where Max’s father is. But there is an assumption, a very strong assumption by the family and those who’ve been looking for little Max that he is alive. The last information that was reliable was that the hospital had said he survived. And we know this through a doctor who then talked to a Ukrainian soldier. I mean, these are all sort of, these are little sort of webs of information, little grids of information. You have to, who can you rely on? You know, it’s, it’s kind of an atypical situation for journalists because we like to nail things down pretty firmly. Do you know what I mean? And we can’t really nail it down.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. And that’s the mystery of the story of Max, was what happened to Max. And it’s really central to your film. So, Max has one of many stories, right? The Ukrainian government says that about 19,000 Ukrainian children are being held in Russian territories. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and for his children’s commissioner, um, for unlawful deportation and transfer of children. So, let’s talk about, the Russia response to this. Russia doesn’t necessarily deny that there are Ukrainian children in their custody, but what are they saying?

PAUL KENYON: Well, the Russians say we’re saving lives. We’re saving the lives of children on the front line because when, we progress into Ukrainian held territory, there’s bombing from both sides. And so what we’re doing is we’re, uh, taking children from schools, boarding schools, orphanages, etc. And we’re taking them back away from the front into Russian held territory to save them, to protect them from shelling. And, um, Ukrainians get furious about this and say absolute nonsense, this is just an excuse. What you’re really doing is you’re kidnapping kids, you’re taking them back into Russian held territory, and then you’re feeding them propaganda, Russian propaganda. You’re dressing them in Russian uniforms, um, and you’re changing their views on their homeland. So, what you’re doing is you’re erasing, the Ukrainians would say, their national identity. But the Russians maintain very strongly that all they’re doing all the way through this is protecting children from front line activities.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Paul, there’s a really vivid moment in the film. I want you to describe it. It’s in the archive. You see children on stage being hugged by Russian officials. Tell me about that scene.

PAUL KENYON: Yeah, well, this is, um, one year after the war began, so this is in the spring of 2023, and Vladimir Putin is talking to a huge stadium full of people

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I mean, it’s, it’s so many people.

PAUL KENYON: Yeah, and these are people celebrating like it’s a football match. It looks like a huge sporting event. And they bring a group of children onto the stage in front of these screaming and cheering crowds. People screaming and cheering in excitement because of their support for what’s happening. They bring on these small children. Some of them, you know, three or four years old, it seems to me. And one of the older children is given a microphone and says, we come from Mariupol, which is a Ukrainian city, which was taken by Russia early in the war. So, they’re from Mariupol and with lots of people encouraging her and smiling and applauding on the stage, she says, thank you for saving us. Thank you for saving us. And she is encouraged to go across and hug, uh, a rather imposing soldier who’s standing there, who is apparently in Mariupol at the time. And she calls him Uncle Yuri, and says, thank you for saving us, Uncle. But the children who’ve been taken advantage of for displays of propaganda like this, they don’t know that who was shelling who.  So, This was, um, this is children being used as political leverage and political tools to celebrate what Putin has been doing with children.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right? So, in some cases, Ukrainian families have been able to retrieve their children from Russian territories. What have you learned from that process? What have the families told you? What have the kids been able to talk about?

PAUL KENYON: Yeah, you’re right. Um, it, it, it has happened. And it’s a, it’s, it’s a sort of slightly complex formula because there is no tried and tested route. And, let’s put it this way. It was informal, I think is a good way of saying it. And so that we’re told by some of the agencies who began to assist some of the, these are Ukrainian agencies, they would assist mothers going to try and find their children. Um, if you can get into Russia, get across the border, not get questioned by, uh, Putin’s secret police and you manage to get to a place where you know your child is, you might be able to negotiate with a local governor who might feel pity upon you. And if you’ve got the right documentation, they may let your child go. So, there’s an organization that we spend a lot of time with, in this program, which is called Save Ukraine, and some of them are lawyers, and some of them are social workers, and they get together minibuses to get across the border. They don’t go directly across the Russian border, they go through Belarus, then sometimes they will catch a plane and they will organize for groups of mothers to go and try and find their children. A lot of these groups of mothers who think they know where their child is, they never manage to get there. They get turned back by Russian security before they get anywhere near.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH:   Paul, there’s a moment in the film where there’s a group of mothers, you know, you just talked about them, mothers and even a grandmother who were talking about, you know, what it’s going to take to get these kids back and that they’ll risk their lives. And I have to say, I wondered why are they the ones venturing there? Why aren’t soldiers and or the government of Ukraine brokering these, returns of children?

PAUL KENYON: Well, the first thing is that all their husbands, uh, and the majority of, uh, of, of men of that age, they’re going to be in the, the military.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: In the military, right, yeah…

PAUL KENYON: Yeah. And also if you’re caught as a Ukrainian man inside Russia, you’re going to be picked up as a spy very quickly. So it’s, it falls upon the mothers. It’s a good question about why the military, the Ukrainian military don’t, um, but as, as it’s become more difficult to go and collect your children, there has been a slight change, interestingly, over the last, uh, few months, which is that the Ukrainian government has started to do negotiations with, uh, Russia to bring back these kids, and it’s all about prisoner swaps. Prisoner swaps and children coming home.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: That’s happening currently?

PAUL KENYON: Yeah.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And what, what kind of results are, are they seeing?

PAUL KENYON: This intriguingly for us as journalists is something that they don’t really want to talk about because they don’t want that particular channel of communication to be damaged in any way. But what we can say is that it is bringing children back. I’ve seen photographs of, um, groups of Ukrainian children who just come across the border and by this time are in the Baltic states. So, they’re brought across a friendly border and they’re there with, uh, relief workers who I know. Now, the Russians will say, Well, that means the system’s working, doesn’t it? That we’re talking to Ukraine, that children are being found, that if you can prove that you are the guardian, the legal guardian, then the children are coming back. So, things are functioning, so there is some kind of cooperation.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, Paul, what are you hearing from these families and what are you hearing from the kids about their time in Russia?

PAUL KENYON: So we met quite a few kids who have spent time in Russian-held territory, and, um, one of the themes, we heard about a lot, was being made to sing the Russian anthem. So, you know, these are Ukrainian kids being made to sing the anthem of the country that is invading their own country and which their fathers are fighting against, uh, and which their families are opposed to. So, and we know this because they’re in the program. And funnily enough, some of them we actually have photographs of being made to wear Russian army uniforms, uh, in educational establishments in Russian held territory. So one of the boys in our program, uh, we see him, he’s there with a Russian army uniform. I think he was 16 at the time, 15 or 16. And he’s got that Z, which we’re all familiar with, on his arm.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Of course, right.

PAUL KENYON: Um, and he says, I was made, uh, even on our days off, we had to sing the Russian anthem. And, you know, the Ukrainians will say it’s propaganda and it is changing minds and it is erasing national identity is what the Ukrainians would say and that is very much what it looks like.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, you traveled, Paul, with members of a group called IPHR. That’s the International Partnership for Human Rights, and you went with them into the territories reclaimed from Russian occupation, areas not far from the front lines of the war. Tell us about this group and their mission, and where did you travel with them?

PAUL KENYON: So yeah, the IPHR were, um, they’re really brave group of individuals, two women and a man, and they’re young people who feel very, very strongly, passionately about this, and their job is to go into recently liberated territories, collect evidence, and give it to the international criminal courts so they can decide whether or not war crimes have been committed. Um, so, you know, the territory they have to go to is where the tide has receded, if you like, the Russian tide has receded, and the evidence is laid bare from their position so they can only go and interview people when the Russians are out and find out uh, what’s happened in that territory. So, they go down the front, uh, through Donbass. Uh, we went to Kherson with them. All this area is right up against the front line and these little towns and villages where the Russians have been pushed out, uh, by the Ukrainians and where they now collect their evidence. And, um, you know, it’s a dangerous job the IPHR do. They’re utterly committed, but when we were in the city of Kherson, the Russians, uh, are still on the other side of the river, which runs through the center of Kherson. So, you’re only a couple of kilometers away, uh, from the front line. And these people go there, they take the risk, they go and interview children, and they want to find out what happened to these children. They don’t want second or third hand accounts. They want to speak to the children themselves to discover what happened. So that’s what they do, and it’s, you know, it’s a job which takes them into very dangerous territory and we were very fortunate to be allowed to film with them.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: In one scene, we watch as the investigators interview a Ukrainian girl named Anastasia who had just been returned to her family. Tell me about Anastasia and just explain to me what happened to her.

PAUL KENYON: Anastasia is a really remarkable, bubbly, excitable, probably slightly temperamental kid and she, um, it’s a fascinating story because right at the beginning of the war one of her school teachers said to her parents, it’s really important the children go to a camp in Crimea. It’ll give them a break from the fighting, um, and, uh, they’ll feel a lot safer there. So, Anastasia and her sister went off. They agreed to go to the camp because they thought, well, a two week holiday. What child is going to turn down a two week holiday out in the sea? So they both agreed to go, but two weeks turned into three weeks, turned into two months, three months, four months, turned into six months, and by this time they realized that They were not free to go whenever they wanted, and in fact, uh, they heard officials, the Russian officials around their camp, began to talk to them about the possibility of being fostered by a Russian family. And of course, that’s enormously distressing. As Anastasia said to us, she said, I thought they were insane. I’ve got my own family back in Kherson. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to go to a Russian foster family.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: You know, Anastasia, the scene with her is one of the most vivid scenes in the film where you you get a real sense of the impact on children. How do you manage these conversations with kids? Were the parents there? So how did you manage that?

PAUL KENYON: It’s a really good question. I think the feeling is, you know, among some of these families, they’re very war scarred and they say, well, um, you know, it was their experience. This is what they lived. And there’s no point in me telling you about his second hand. They lived it, ask them. And we had parents saying to us, don’t ask us, ask the children. They were the ones who were there. And I find it quite a healthy attitude actually, rather than, you know, particularly for a journalist, it’s great to get to a firsthand account, but also to give the children their own voice, you know, as long as they didn’t feel under any pressure.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, I think in, in filmmaking and documentary filmmaking, you know, there’s always that fine line, right, of voyeurism versus actually giving somebody a voice. And I think what I saw in the way that you talk to these children is that there was a respectful conversation. You didn’t go too far. You were able to let them share what they wanted to share and that was really important to me. So, what is the latest, um, Paul, that you can tell us about the ICC, have you heard any major movement in terms of the International Criminal Court?

PAUL KENYON: Not really. I think what’s happening is the ICC are diligently collecting, uh, the evidence. But you know, they already think they’ve got a very strong case. But of course, we know that realistically, how do you get him? How do you get him, or his Children’s Commissioner, who’s also wanted by the ICC, you know, that’s, it’s something that’s not realistically going to happen as things stand. And it’s quite difficult to imagine a scenario where Putin will ever end up in The Hague. And the Russian response to all this is the ICC, uh, is talking absolute nonsense. And we are going to start investigating the ICC. So, um, the idea that the ICC is going to come to any conclusion about this in terms of assessing the evidence and hearing from Putin’s side soon, is not very likely.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Paul, when you think about this story – you’ve done so many films out of Ukraine. What, what stays with you the most from this documentary?

PAUL KENYON: Well, you know, I suppose there’s one scene that will stay with me, which was Max’s little sister. Uh, and it goes back to what you were saying earlier about interviewing children. And I, I said, to her aunt, her guardian. I was saying, you know, what does she remember about Max? Little Max, can she tell us a bit about, etc, etc. And the auntie said, why don’t you just ask her yourself? You know, she, she’s the one who’ll be able to tell you from the heart what this is like. So, we put her in front of the camera, and she has a little brother as well, who is Max’s brother. And they both sat in front of the camera. And we were about to start the interview and the little boy suddenly just burst into tears. And wanted to be taken away. And I said, of course, of course, let him be taken away. And I asked the little girl, I asked her a couple of questions and I thought, I’ve got to be really cautious about this because you’ve got to ask things like, you know, I always start off interviews like that with, so what’s your favorite subject at school? And, um, you know, what do you like doing at school? And just nice, easy questions. And then I said to her, you know, what are your, your memories of Max? And she was quite good. And then I said… And then you get to the key question. The key question was, what happened on the day that you were ambushed by those soldiers in Mariupol? And I put it in a very different way. I just said, what happened on the day that you heard all those loud gunshots? And she sat there, and she had a big smile on her face, and her smile sort of, it, it continued, but she just looked into the air, and looked both ways. And she said, I can’t remember. And because she’s blocked it out, and I knew she, she’s going to be suffering in a way which none of us can really understand. And, you know, she’s, she’s blocked this out of her memory. And the reason I remember it is because I just thought she was such an innocent child to have lost a brother. a mother, a father, in an ambush in Mariupol, and then be sitting there with a broad smile on her face, trying to answer questions for a member of the foreign press. And, um, when she said, I can’t, it makes me a bit tearful now, because when she said, I just can’t remember, I looked at her and I thought, I can’t go on with this, and I said, we, I can’t ask her any more questions, because it just, doesn’t feel right and she was so pleased she had a little fairy dress on.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yes, I saw that.

PAUL KENYON: And she wanted to be treated like a sort of princess but she was so pleased that she’d done the interview that she was smiling and skipping afterwards but you know I just knew there was no further I could have taken her into that trauma.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Well, I think that’s what I was talking about. You really do get the sense that you respected the children and what they could share and not share and it’s a really vivid moment. Well, we really appreciate the humanity at the center of this and all of your journalism around it was fascinating to hear about as well. Thanks for joining me on the Dispatch, Paul. Thank you.

PAUL KENYON: Cheers. Thanks.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Thanks again to Paul Kenyon for joining me on the Dispatch. You can watch Children of Ukraine on Frontline. org, Frontline’s YouTube channel, and the PBS app.