Matvii, Sviatoslava and Sascha are three Ukrainian brothers whom the Ukrainian forces they separated from their father when they tried to escape from besieged Mariupol, a city that has recently visited Putin.

Now, Matvii tells how he was forced to choose between two options: be adopted by a Russian family or enter an orphanage. “I knew they were forcing me into an adoptive family,” he confessed.

The father of these children, Yevhen, finally got to be released 45 days later, but when he tried to find his children, they were already on their way to Moscow. It was then that the odyssey to find them began.

“A car took me to the border. There, Russian intelligence interrogated me and finally let me through,” Yevhen Mezhevyi said. After 90 days of anguish, he managed to get his children back. “I can’t explain it with words”he has confessed.

However, this is not an isolated case. They are just three of the more than 16,000 children who, according to the Ukrainian government, have been kidnapped and taken to the other side of the border. Anastasia, a Ukrainian teenager, she was released a few weeks ago.

“They promised us money, houses and apartments, but they really wanted us to adopt their way of thinking,” he said.

Russian forces too Olga’s six children were kidnapped until they managed to meet again. “They told them that we had abandoned them to turn them against us,” this mother has now explained.

It is cases like these that have led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant. arrest against Putin. In response, Russia has opened a criminal case against the chief prosecutor of the Court and former Russian Prime Minister has threatened The Hague with a missile attack.