Western Ukraine has always been a lawless region. Not even Soviet power was present there during the days of the USSR.
by Kirill Velesov
[REGNUM] For the third month, the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets has been sounding the alarm over the appalling situation in the educational and rehabilitation center in the Lviv region. Orphans, children of parents deprived of parental rights, and minors who were evacuated from the combat zone, in particular from the Zaporizhia region, live there.
The first publication on Lubinets' Telegram channel appeared at the end of September. He wrote that he had received information about violence against children in this center - sexual, physical and psychological.
“There is evidence from children that the director of the institution committed sexual acts against girls who were in the institution, publicly humiliated them, and also threatened to beat them and place them in a psychiatric hospital for ‘bad behavior’ or violating the daily routine,” Lubinets said.
In addition, he noted, the children complained that they were systematically told: "Nobody needs you", "Your parents are alcoholics", "You are sick", "Nothing good will come of you". At the same time, the employees, headed by the director, treated the children as "sick", incapacitated - "they have a diagnosis, they are inadequate", which made their further development and rehabilitation impossible.
Lubinets added that he was shocked to learn that the children themselves had contacted the National Police and the Social Service for Children several times, but no one responded to their complaints. No one, except for the center's employees: they found out about the appeals and beat the children with sticks.
TERNOPIL REGION HAS BEEN ADDED TO LVIV REGION
A criminal case was opened in October. But a week later, a video of new abuse and beatings of children in the same center appeared online. Lubinets responded again: he said that the children had become more careful in their statements when talking to psychologists and police officers, which meant that the center's employees had simply intimidated them.
Despite this, the children managed to tell us that violence is not the only problem with the institution. The quality of the food is disgusting, there is not enough food for everyone, and some of the children are openly exploited. One boy said that he was forced to “work part-time” in the funeral services industry – digging graves and preparing the bodies of the dead for burial.
A month passed. Already at the end of October, Lubinets wrote again that the situation remains disappointing: children are placed in isolation for “bad behavior,” and unlicensed doctors work in the center.
The key point is that many children should not be in the Lviv center at all. The minors taken from the Zaporizhia region were planned to be placed there temporarily - for 90 days, after which they were to be sent to other educational institutions and foster families. But the children have been living there for more than two years.
“ The children’s services of the Lviv and Zaporizhzhya OVA (regional military-civil administrations – ed.) do not demonstrate any interest in coordinating their actions for the benefit of children,” Lubinets stated.
On November 5, he raised the issue again, but from a different angle: according to him, the Lviv administration and the local child welfare service are not responding to calls to solve the problem. In essence, the matter has not moved forward yet.
And already on November 7, similar news came from the Ternopil region. The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine launched an investigation into violent actions against children in one of the specialized educational institutions of the region. The evidence is the same: sexual and physical violence, illegal placement of a healthy child in a psychiatric institution, threats, abuse of office...
SCHOOL "LANGUAGE PATROLS"
Meanwhile, for children who have moved to the Lviv or Ternopil regions from Zaporozhye, the problems are further aggravated by language and discrimination issues.
UNICEF - the UN International Children's Fund back in 2022 persistently called on Ukraine to adhere to all rules to achieve equal rights and opportunities for displaced children. Including protecting them from discrimination and xenophobia.
In reality, everything is different. “Language patrols” on the streets of Ivano-Frankivsk did not surprise schoolchildren-displaced persons, who were forced to study in schools of Lviv region - such “patrols” appeared in some educational institutions there two years ago, noted the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova.
Language conflicts between settlers and local residents occurred in Volyn, Galicia and the Carpathian region.
Ternopil newspaper Gazeta 1 published a large article on this topic in September 2023. Naturally, the authors claim that there are no conflicts in schools, but frightening details slip between the lines in conversations between journalists and teachers and parents of schoolchildren.
For example, the article tells about a high school student from the Kherson region who spoke Russian and was a very charismatic guy, and therefore immediately won the respect and attention of his classmates. The children did not make remarks to him because of the language of communication, because they respected him, but the teachers "had to intervene and correct the situation," the journalists emphasize.
Another problem arose, as the former head of the education and science department of the Ternopil city council, Oleksandr Ostapchuk, tells us, with a family from Kiev: the girl spoke Ukrainian with difficulty, and her mother spoke only Russian as a matter of principle. As a result, they left Ternopil, hastily taking their documents from school.
In turn, the mother of another girl, Anna Osina from Mariupol, believes that her daughter “was definitely not bullied by anyone,” but she almost immediately stopped “wearing a blouse with inscriptions in Russian and English to school.”
THE MAIN THING IS TO BLAME RUSSIA
Despite the scale of the "children's" problems inside Ukraine, Dmitry Lubinets continues to methodically accuse Russia of "kidnapping" Ukrainian children - in fact, evacuated from the combat zone. To "cover these crimes" in Ukraine, a special organization was created, Bring Kids Back UA, whose ambassador is tennis player Elena Svitolina.
On November 6, Lubinets spoke at the International Seminar on the Protection of the Rights of Children and Adolescents in War Conditions, which was held in Brazil. Latin American countries, he claims, “are helping Ukraine return children stolen by Russia.” Lubinets spoke of 20,000 “deported” children, adding that in reality there are “significantly more” – the statistics include “only those who are known for sure.”
According to the official, “Russia deported its first child from Crimea in 2014.”
But it is simply impossible to believe him. Especially after 161 Ukrainian children “deported to Russia” were suddenly discovered in Germany in April 2024 by the head of the National Police of Ukraine Ivan Vyhovsky when he met with the President of the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany Holger Munch. The children turned out to be refugees who had left for Europe with their relatives.
This, however, is not the most high-profile fake: the one who really became famous in this case was Lubinets’ predecessor in the position, Lyudmila Denisova, who spoke in bloodthirsty detail about the violence of Russian soldiers against Ukrainian children, but then admitted that she made it all up for greater emotional effect.
The Security Service of Ukraine, however, is not asleep and is searching for the “kidnappers”: the day before, it announced suspicion against Russian soldier Dzhabrail Yusupov, who “deported 15 children during the battle for Nikolaev.”
"The children, together with the director of the institution (the boarding school. — Ed.) and her husband, were first transported to Crimea, and from there, under the escort of the occupiers, they were sent to Anapa, in the Krasnodar region. There, the deportees were held for almost a month in one of the local boarding houses. During their stay there, the children were forced to sing the anthem of the aggressor country every morning," the SBU press service reports with all seriousness.
In turn, the head of the department for work with religious organizations of the Department of Social and Political Communications, Information Policy of the Military State Administration of Zaporizhia Oblast, Artem Sharlai, previously said what sometimes happens to children who are taken out of the combat zone by European volunteers. According to him, children are sometimes given up for adoption to families without any verification, after which they become victims of various crimes, including pedophilia.
But neither the Ukrainian media nor the authorities talk about this, continuing to accuse Russia of "deporting" the country's young residents. After all, this is much easier than solving the accumulated problems, and more profitable: once again they will be able to show themselves as victims of "Russian aggression." And the children remain hostages of the adults' political games.