Moved, lawyer Kateryna Bobrovskaya falls into the arms of a delighted Bohdan Yermokhin. ” It’s like a dream “, she whispers. After a year and a half in Russia, the final wait lasted less than twenty-four hours, between the teenager’s flight from Moscow and his arrival, Sunday, November 19, at the Domanove crossing point, on the border between Belarus and Ukraine.
The rescue of the Ukrainian child, deported from Mariupol by the Russian army in May 2022, was an incredible soap opera, with so many setbacks that few hoped for a happy outcome. To tell the truth, even Kateryna Bobrovskaya hardly believed it, but she never gave up.
Bohdan Yermokhin – spelled “Bogdan Ermokhin” by the Russian civil registry – is not one of the thousands of anonymous Ukrainian children who have disappeared in Russia, from orphanages to schools and foster families, and for whom Kiev is seeking the rescue. trace. He is part of an identified group, called “the Mariupol 31”, which was transferred from an orphanage in the city conquered by the Russian army to the Polyani center, in the Moscow region, under the direct supervision of the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. She herself adopted one of them, Filip Golovnya.
The “Mariupol 31” operation helped establish indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, suspected of war crimes for having designed and implemented a policy of deportation and Russification of Ukrainian children, under the cover of humanitarian evacuations. kyiv estimates that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been deported.
Summons from the military recruitment office
Bohdan Yermokhin, for his part, never gave up the idea, even when he sent desperate messages, of returning to Ukraine. He tried twice to escape Russia, without success. Having become her lawyer on March 15 thanks to another deported teenager, a friend of Bohdan known under the pseudonym “Roman”, who managed to return discreetly to Ukraine, Kateryna Bobrovskaya fought, alone or almost, for eight months, for her back. She spoke every night via messaging with the teen. She obtained official documents making her cousin, Valeria Poparcha, her legal guardian.
A race against time was underway for the return of Bohdan Yermokhin because he reached the age of 18 on November 19, and had already received a summons from the military recruitment office of the Russian army. Three elements have finally made it possible, in recent weeks, to unblock the situation. First, the teenager managed to be received by the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Russian Federation, Tatiana Moskalkova, to have her call his cousin and promise that he would return to his country.
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