Three women from war-torn Ukraine arrived on Capitol Hill last month to issue a plea to congressional leaders: Help us rescue our children from Russia.
They said they haven’t seen their loved ones in roughly four years, since the early months of their country’s war with Russia, who disappeared from a school for students with severe disabilities in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson after Russia’s occupation of the area.
A new report from the Emile Foundation says it was Russian authorities that took their adult children. The humanitarian organization — which says it has helped return 50 Ukrainian children and provides support to reunified families — now believes it has located dozens taken from the school.
The Emile report says the Russians transferred the residents in groups in the fall of 2022. The foundation says it used a combination of documentary evidence, interviews with family and witnesses, satellite images and facial recognition technology to reconstruct the movements of those taken across the occupied territories in Ukraine and — in some cases — into Russia itself.
MS NOW has not independently verified the contents of the report.
“The ultimate goal is to eradicate the Ukrainian identity, the culture, the history,” said Mariam Lambert, co-founder and CEO of the Emile Foundation, who led the group’s delegation to Washington, D.C. “How do you do that? You go straight to the most vulnerable people: children and adults with disabilities.”
The foundation says the women took a series of meetings with five lawmakers and two additional congressional offices across two days on the Hill. In telling their stories to American officials, they hoped to raise awareness for their loved ones’ plight and help organize international support for eventual reunions.
“We just need a pathway, a third country intermediary to return those children safely to their families,” Lambert said.
Senators and staff alike were visibly moved in their sitdowns with the mothers. Asked after their meetings what they could do to help, Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut both talked about using their positions to keep the public’s attention on the issue.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., suggested he and his colleagues may be able to help forge that pathway to return the missing.
“There might be some countries that we know that we have good – some of us have good relationships with,” he said. “We could ask them, like, ‘Can you go and talk to these Russians?’”
An Emile Foundation spokesperson told MS NOW the organization plans to draft a letter on behalf of lawmakers that would ask the Trump administration for help in creating a pathway home for the disappeared people. The letter would offer officials a list of names of those the foundation believes they’ve located.
In interviews with MS NOW, the three women describe the agony of waiting for years for any information about their loved ones.
“You think, think, think about her, but you can’t move anything. You can’t change anything,” Larysa Branytska said.
The report says her granddaughter, Marina, was removed at 23 years old.
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“Everything is turning upside down in your soul,” she said.
Hanna Zamyshliaieva faced a terrible choice before the transfers. She could rescue her son Anton from the facility, or evacuate her other two children first.
She decided to get the others to safety, believing she’d have time to return for Anton. But that chance never came.
“If he doesn’t receive the care he needs, it would be better for him not to be alive, really, because he would be hurting so much, there would be so much pain in his brain,” Zamyshliaieva said.
The children in the Emile report represent a much larger cohort of missing Ukrainian youth — the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab estimates at least 35,000 children from Ukraine are either temporarily or permanently in Russian custody.
The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment about the findings in the Emile report. In the past, Russian officials have denied claims they took Ukrainian children involuntarily, saying they have evacuated people voluntarily from the war zone for safety reasons.
But in a report published last year, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab found at least 210 facilities to which Ukrainian children have been taken. The report says more than 60% of those facilities saw Ukrainian youth subjected to re-education, as well as militarization in at least 18%. The lab believes the Kremlin manages more than half of all the sites.
Last month, President Donald Trump signed a new bipartisan sanctions package targeting Russia’s economy. It was a posthumous feather in the cap of Trump’s late ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who co-wrote the bill with Blumenthal.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson told MS NOW the department plans to provide $25 million in new assistance to help identify, return and rehabilitate removed Ukrainian children.
Asked if she has hope she’ll see her granddaughter again, Branytska smiled and looked down at her shirt — emblazoned with Marina’s picture.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “I’ll wait until she comes back.”
Nick McCool is an overnight reporter for MS NOW.
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