Ukrainian orphan teenager's story from Mariupol heard at US Congress

Viktoriia Andrieieva, staff writer at Ukrainska Pravda.Zhyttia, 20 April 2023

16-year-old Bohdan Yermokhin from Mariupol was deported to Russia by the occupiers in 2022.  His lawyer, Kateryna Bobrovska, spoke at the Congress in Washington on 19 April. She told the story of a teenager who is not being released by a terrorist country, journalist and activist Maria Lebedeva reported.

Speech of the lawyer in the USA. Screenshot from the video recording

"I was contacted by a teenager named Bohdan. He was born in Mariupol. He was in Russia with Roman (another deported boy) and also received a new family.

The adopting family also took away his papers. Then he reached out to me for help," Kateryna Bobrovska began. She noted that the boy is under psychological pressure.

He was eager to go back to Ukraine and travelled more than 1,000 km to the border.

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His Russian adoptive parents took away Ukrainian documents from a teenager from Mariupol. Therefore, the Ukrainian side produced special papers for him, according to which he was supposed to leave the territory of the aggressor country.

However, the Russian secret services did not release him.  Special forces took the boy to the investigative committee for interrogation, and then detained him. After that, Bohdan was also used for filming propaganda stories on Russian television. 

"When I saw one of the stories shot with him after he was detained, I noticed important changes in him. He had dark areas under his eyes, and his haircut was changed. They cut his hair short, as if he was going to serve in the military.

The words he was saying on Russian TV were not adequate to what really was happening. Apparently he was either threatened or was just told to say what the government wanted," the lawyer continues. Kateryna Bobrovska also had a case with another teenager, Roman, who managed to return to Ukraine.

"The stories of Roman and Bohdan have a lot in common, and this tells us that such crimes are systematic and widely spread, and they happen in those temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. These facts tell us that this was a detailed, premeditated operation aimed to deport Ukrainian children to Russia," Kateryna emphasised during the Congress. Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children's Affairs, stated that the teenager was not allowed to leave the country.

He was stopped at the border with Belarus. It is worth noting that Bohdan Yermokhin was an orphan at the time of the full-scale invasion. His legal representative was the director of the Mariupol college where the young man studied.

However, the occupiers illegally transferred the teenager first to Donetsk and then to Moscow Oblast, where he was adopted by a Russian family.

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