Putin’s thugs walk around Ukrainian orphanage with terrifying cameras, showing them going from room to room looking for children to kidnap and turn into soldiers

Russian FSB agents and armed soldiers were caught on video surveillance snooping around a Ukrainian orphanage with the intention of kidnapping children and then sending them to Moscow.

Ukrainian intelligence believes as many as 13,000 orphans – some as young as toddlers – have been kidnapped and shipped to Russia, where the boys will be indoctrinated with pro-Kremlin propaganda and teenagers trained to become soldiers.

Volodymyr Sahaidak, the director of an orphanage near Kherson, an area formerly under Russian control before a Ukrainian battle forced the retreat, hid the 52 orphans in his care when he knew Putin’s thugs were advancing and the sent children to local families, who took them. despite the risk of being arrested or shot.

CCTV footage from the orphanage shows agents from the FSB, which replaced the KGB, and gunmen who found the orphanage completely empty and forced them to raid its files and computers, hoping to find out where the orphans were hiding.

Mr Sahaidak told Sky News: “We’ve seen Russian propagandists say we should put the orphans in military schools, indoctrinate them and get them to fight for Russia.

“That was the biggest thing, so we started hiding kids because we knew they were going to take them.”

Local families each took in up to four orphans to protect them during the Russian occupation – and they were never found by the invading forces.

“It seemed like I would just take my children away if I didn’t hide them,” Mr Sahaidak said.

Ukrainian intelligence claims up to 13,000 orphans – including some babies – have been kidnapped and shipped to Russia

CCTV footage from the orphanage shows Russian agents and armed fighters finding the orphanage completely empty

Local families each took in up to four orphans to protect them during the Russian occupation, and they were never found by the invading forces

Local families took in up to four orphans each to protect them during the Russian occupation

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But with the orphanage on Russian soil, Vladimir Putin’s troops instead sent 15 children captured from other parts of Ukraine before being brought to Russia when they were forced to withdraw from Kherson.

A teacher named Oxana, who works at the orphanage, said the frightened children were put into military vehicles by soldiers armed with machine guns.

Natalya Kadyrova, who lives next door to another orphanage in Kherson, said she has seen children as young as three ripped from their safe haven, even though child abduction is a serious violation of the rules of war.

The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said that 48 orphans between the ages of three and five were taken from this orphanage in Kherson and an investigation was launched with the participation of the Ukrainian secret service.

at a regional children’s hospital in Kherson, fabricating medical records of orphans to make it appear they were too sick to move.

“We intentionally wrote false information that the children are sick and cannot be transported,” says Dr. Olga Pilyarska, head of the surveillance unit.

“We were afraid that (the Russians) would find out. We decided to save the children at all costs.’

The staff invented diseases for 11 abandoned babies in their care so that they would not have to give them to the local orphanage, where they knew they would be given Russian papers and could be taken.

One baby was “bleeding from the lungs,” another had “uncontrollable convulsions,” and another required “artificial ventilation,” Dr. Pilyarska.

In the maternity ward of the regional children’s hospital in Kherson in southern Ukraine, hospital staff care for orphans

During the war in Ukraine, Russian authorities were accused of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-occupied territories to raise as their own.

Toys and a doll lie on the floor of a playhouse in the garden of the Kherson Regional Children’s Home in Kherson

Earlier this year, it was reported that Russia was trying to give thousands of Ukrainian children to Russian families for foster care or adoption.

Officials deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian territories without permission, lied to them that their parents did not want them, used them for propaganda, gave them Russian citizenship and transferred them to Russian families.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington DC think tank, said Russian officials are waging a targeted depopulation campaign in occupied parts of Ukraine, deporting children under the guise of medical rehabilitation and adoption programs.

Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that the relocation of children to Russia is to protect them from hostilities.

Russia’s foreign ministry has denied allegations that the country is confiscating and deporting children.

It was claimed that the authorities were looking for relatives of orphans left behind in Ukraine to send them home if possible.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed in October that more than 1.6 million of his citizens had been deported during the war, many of whom were stripped of all documents and then dispersed across Russia. “They steal people,” he said.

On the front line, the general staff of the Ukrainian army said today that fighting in the southeastern Donetsk region continues to be centered on Bakhmut and near Avdiivka.

Near Bakhmut, Russian troops shelled about ten villages, while near Avdiivka they shelled the towns of Kostyantyivka and Maryinka, as well as Vodyane and Nevelske, the Ukrainian military said.

Donetsk is one of four regions that Moscow reportedly annexed after September’s so-called referenda, which Kiev and the West dismissed as fake and illegal.

Russia’s Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov said on Thursday that the front line in Ukraine was stable and Moscow’s troops were focused on “completing the liberation of the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic”.