Ukraine has been telling anyone who would listen for months that Russia had a formal state-sponsored plan to effectively steal Ukrainian children, take them to Russia and turn them against their own country.
The Ukrainian government and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) say the number of missing children in the last year alone is more than 16,000.
They say the Russian brainwashing programme dates back to the start of this conflict in 2014, and in that time more than 700,000 children have been illegally moved.
Some parents have grown so desperate, they are risking travelling thousands of miles from Ukraine through Poland, then Belarus and Russia to Crimea to get their children back.
In a hostel in Kyiv set up for refugees, I met Lyudmila Motychakand her 15-year-old daughter Anastasia.
Lyudmila had undertaken this harrowing journey, but she lit up when she showed me the emotional video of the pair reuniting outside a Russian children’s facility in Crimea, after months apart.
Image: Nastya and her mother Lyudmila spoke to Sky News about their ordeal
Sceptical from the start, Lyudmila described how she was effectively tricked into letting her daughter go on a school trip, organised by the Russian-supporting authorities in Kherson and Crimea.
She said: “We were told that it will be a camp, and that the children were going there for two weeks, and they told us not to worry, that they would bring our children back, that a lot of children were going.
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“I was afraid to let her go from the beginning. I was saying it’s a war, she shouldn’t go, but they insisted everything would be okay.
“They told me not to worry, everything will be okay. They said there is no war there, everything is good there, they will feed them five times a day and it’s good for her health, and that there is everything there, even a swimming pool.”
Two weeks later when her daughter didn’t return, Lyudmila realised something more sinister was at play.
“They told me it would be very good for my child, but there was nothing like that there, to tell the truth.”
Forced to sing Russia’s national anthem
Lyudmila described how she rang up the teachers, and the director of the educational college that her daughter attended. They kept telling her she would be returned at some point, but that the trip had turned into an evacuation because of the war.
Her daughter Anastasia, who goes by Nastya, told us that when she left Kherson, she departed on a convoy of 100 buses, each carrying 30 to 40 children. That’s more than 3,000 children on just one trip.
The opportunity was described to her as something like a “summer camp”, even though it was October.
But, she says, it was nothing like that.
She described how they were forced to sing Russia’s national anthem and follow strict orders.
“They said to us: ‘We are feeding you, we give you water, and we give you heating and comfort, and you’re so ungrateful.’
“They were confiscating balloons we had in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, and they were also shouting at us, saying: ‘We are ungrateful’, and to ‘go back to your fascists’.”
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1:50
Ex-Putin adviser: ‘Russia does not steal children’
When two weeks passed, Nastya asked if she could go home, but the authorities were buying time.
She said: “They started delaying and telling us on this date… you will go back home, don’t worry.
“But we didn’t go when those dates came.
“Then they started telling us other dates, but we never left.
“Then they told us it was an evacuation, and then finally they said we have to stay indefinitely – and that only our parents can come get us out.”
With the help of Save Ukraine, a Ukrainian NGO that helps families travel to Russia and the occupied territories to get their children back, Lyudmila and Nastya were able to reunite.
‘Indoctrination of our children’
Lyudmila believes it was always the plan to take the children for good and then try to convince the parents to follow – and stay.
She said: “They took the children and then they wanted parents to join their children, and then they were promising money, and they were promising homes and apartments, financial help.
“Of course they wanted to people to adopt their way of thinking. They wanted people to join them and play by their rules.”
The Ukrainian authorities and Save Ukraine say this is all part of a detailed strategy Russia had to take Ukraine’s children.
Save Ukraine spokesperson Olga Yerokhina said: “We consider it re-education and indoctrination of our children, and when I think about those children who haven’t got any parents for different reasons, how will we find them at all.”
“We must look at this from the perspective of history. It’s nothing new and this whole thing was prepared. What do they do with children… it’s part of a bigger policy against Ukraine.”
Image: Olga Yerokhina
I asked her if she thought it was part of a well-orchestrated plan.
She replied: “Yeah, we understand that it was not only about the full-scale invasion in 2022, it was prepared long before this.”
The exact number of children who have left Ukraine, or been forcibly removed, and may never be seen or heard from again, is unknown.
But the International Criminal Court (ICC) charges may one day bring someone involved to justice. That’s what Olga Yerokhina wants – some kind of concerted international plan and justice.
She said: “We have a lot of work to do.
“We hope the international community and Poland and the United Nations, that together we can create some kind of mechanism to return these children.
“We are realistic. Maybe we can’t do it for all of them, but we have to do as much as we can.”
Four more arrests have been made by French police investigating the Louvre museum heist.
Two men and two women from the Parisregion were detained on Tuesday, prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
Ms Beccuau’s statement did not say what role the quartet are suspected of having played in the robbery. The two men are aged 38 and 39, and the two women are aged 31 and 40.
They are being interrogated by police, who can hold them for questioning for 96 hours.
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2:36
Louvre: How ‘heist of the century’ unfolded
The latest arrests come after investigating magistrates filed preliminary charges against three men and one woman who were arrested last month.
The haul – which included a diamond and emerald necklace Napoleon gave to Empress Marie-Louise, jewels linked to 19th-century Queens Marie-Amelie and Hortense, and Empress Eugenie’s pearl and diamond tiara – has not been recovered.
The heist was pulled off in mere minutes last month – and took place while the Louvre was open to visitors, raising doubts over the credibility of the world’s most-visited museum as a guardian for its priceless works.
On Sunday 19 October, two men used a stolen furniture lift to access the second floor Galerie d’Apollon.
They then cracked open display cases with angle grinders before escaping with their loot and fleeing on the back of two scooters driven by accomplices.
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Moment thieves escape Louvre in jewel heist
The Paris prosecutor previously said the robbery appeared to be the work of small-time criminals rather than professional gangsters.
Speaking shortly after the heist, art detective Arthur Brand told Sky News that detectives faced a “race against time” to recover the stolen treasure.
“These crown jewels are so famous, you just cannot sell them,” Mr Brand said. “The only thing they can do is melt the silver and gold down, dismantle the diamonds, try to cut them. That’s the way they will probably disappear forever.
“They [the police] have a week. If they catch the thieves, the stuff might still be there. If it takes longer, the loot is probably gone and dismantled. It’s a race against time.”
Washington woke up this morning to a flurry of developments on Ukraine.
It was the middle of the night in DC when a tweet dropped from Ukraine’s national security advisor, Rustem Umerov.
He said that the US and Ukraine had reached a “common understanding on the core terms of the agreement discussed in Geneva.”
He added that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would travel to America “at the earliest suitable date in November to complete final steps and make a deal with President Trump”.
By sunrise in Washington, a US official was using similar but not identical language to frame progress.
The official, speaking anonymously to US media, said that Ukraine had “agreed” to Trump’s peace proposal “with some minor details to be worked out”.
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In parallel, it’s emerged that talks have been taking place in Abu Dhabi. The Americans claim to have met both Russian and Ukrainian officials there, though the Russians have not confirmed attendance.
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8:13
Peace deal ‘agreement’: What we know
“I have nothing to say. We are following the media reports,” Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, told Russian state media.
Trump is due to travel to his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago tonight, where he will remain until Sunday.
We know the plan has been changed from its original form, but it’s clear that Zelenskyy wants to be seen to agree to something quickly – that would go down well with President Trump.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial US and Israeli-backed aid distribution group, has said it will permanently cease operations.
Set up as an alternative to United Nations aid programmes in May, GHF’s executive director John Acree said on Monday that it “succeeded in our mission of showing there’s a better way to deliver aid to Gazans”.
The foundation had already closed down aid distribution sites after US President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan was agreed by Hamasand Israelin October.
The GHF which began operations in Gazaafter an Israeli blockade of food deliveries, lasting nearly three months, was criticised by Palestinians, aid workers and health officials who said it forced people to risk their lives to reach the sites.
Image: File pic: Reuters
According to witnesses and videos posted to social media, Israeli soldiers repeatedly opened fire at the sites, killing hundreds. The IDF denied this, saying it only fired warning shots as a crowd-control measure or if its troops were in danger.
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2:54
Gaza deaths increase when aid sites open
MSF – also known as Doctors Without Borders – said in a report in August that the GHF sites “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty,” and described scenes there as “orchestrated killing”.
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‘We are proud,’ says GHF director
Mr Acree said in a statement through the GHF’s website that “from the outset, GHF’s goal was to meet an urgent need” and to hand over a successful aid operation to “the broader international community”.
The GHF would hand over its work to the US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center in Israel overseeing the Gaza ceasefire.
“We are winding down our operations as we have succeeded in our mission of showing there’s a better way to deliver aid to Gazans,” Mr Acree said.
Image: File pic: Reuters
The GHF director added: “At a critical juncture, we are proud to have been the only aid operation that reliably and safely provided free meals directly to Palestinian people in Gaza, at scale and without diversion.
“From our very first day of operations, our mission was singular: feed civilians in desperate need. We built a new model that worked, saved lives, and restored dignity to civilians in Gaza.”
According to the GHF website, the group distributed more than three million food boxes, totalling 187 million meals, and supplied 1.1 million packs of Ready-to-Use Supplementary Food (RUSF) for malnourished children.
In a statement, Hamas welcomed the closure of GHF and accused it of being a project that “engineered starvation” in partnership with Israel.
A Hamas spokesperson said: “Since its entry into the Gaza Strip, this foundation was part of the occupation’s security system, which adopted distribution mechanisms entirely disconnected from humanitarian principles, and created dangerous and degrading conditions for the dignity of the starving Palestinian people during their attempts to obtain a piece of bread, resulting in the killing and injury of thousands, through sniper operations and deliberate killing.”
They also called on international legal bodies to hold “this foundation and its officers accountable for their crimes against our people”.
US state department deputy spokesperson Tommy Piggot also said on X that the aid group “shared valuable lessons learned with us and our partners”.
“GHF’s model, in which Hamas could no longer loot and profit from stealing aid, played a huge role in getting Hamas to the table and achieving a ceasefire,” he added.