“Rehabilitation” in “Dubrava”

Deportation of Ukrainian children to a camp in Belarus. Photo: BelTA

Legal qualification:

• Article 8(2)(a)(vii) of the Rome Statute: Unlawful deportation or transfer.

• Article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) of the Rome Statute: Conscription or transfer of children from occupied territory.

• Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: Prohibition of forced transfer.

N.P., 11 years old, lived with his grandmother in Lysychansk. His parents had died back in 2015. When fighting for the city began in 2022, they spent weeks hiding in the basement. After Russian troops seized the city, a woman in a Russian EMERCOM uniform, accompanied by two soldiers, came into their yard. They brought canned food and told the grandmother that the city was “unsafe” and children were being “evacuated” to Russia, to “safe” camps. The grandmother cried and refused to let him go, but the woman in uniform threatened that “child services” would take him anyway, and that she could be “prosecuted” for disobeying orders of the military administration.

N.P. and about two dozen other children from his district were put on a bus. They were told they were going to a “sanatorium” for three weeks to “rest from the war.” The bus drove for a long time and eventually brought them not to Russia, but to Belarus — to the Dubrava sanatorium in Homyel Region.

At first everything looked like a normal camp: they were fed, given clean clothes, placed in rooms. But the next day the “program” began. In the morning they were lined up and forced to listen to the national anthems of Russia and Belarus. Counselors, speaking with a Russian accent, told them that Ukraine was a “terrorist state” that “bombed Donbas for eight years,” and that Russia and Belarus were their “brotherly saviors.”

“They took us to ‘lessons of courage,’” N.P. later recounted through volunteers who managed to contact him. “Belarusian OMON officers came. They showed us rifles and taught us how to take them apart. They said we must be ready to ‘defend the Union State’ from NATO and ‘Ukrainian Nazis.’”

The central event was a visit from Paralympian Aleksei Talai. He was brought onto the stage in the assembly hall. He told them he had lost his arms and legs not in war but in peacetime, but now he was “with the guys at the front with all his heart.” He brought children letters from Russian soldiers and gifts: sports suits with the Z symbol.

“He said that we were Russian children,” N.P. recalled. “That Lysychansk was Russia. That we had to forget about Ukraine because it had betrayed us. He made us shout ‘Russia! Belarus! Power!’ Some older boys, 15–16 years old, he encouraged to apply to Belarusian military schools. My friend asked when we would go home. A counselor overheard him and scolded him harshly. She said our home was here now.”

Children were not allowed to contact relatives. Their phones were confiscated on the first day. N.P.’s grandmother had no idea where he was for months. When the three weeks of “rehabilitation” ended, N.P. and the other children were not taken back. They were told their “session” was being extended indefinitely “due to shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

Later, thanks to international volunteer organizations, some of the children were returned through third countries. N.P. was among them. But he came back changed — frightened and disoriented. “They told me there that my uncle who serves in the Ukrainian Armed Forces is a ‘fascist,’” he whispered to a psychologist. “They told me I should hate him. But I love him… I don’t understand what is true.”

N.P.’s deportation was not a humanitarian action. It was a war crime, part of which was forced ideological indoctrination and the attempted erasure of identity. And it took place on the territory of Belarus, with the full cooperation of its state structures — from Talai’s foundation to the administration of the sanatorium run by “Belaruskali.”

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