The kidnapping of Margarita Prokopenko
The Story of Margarita Who Became Marina
About fifty children from the Centre for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation, a children's home in Kherson, were abducted by members of the Russian State Duma with the help of employees from Kherson and Crimea. One particular abduction attracted special attention - it was carried out systematically to order.
The kidnapping
Our story begins on February 25, 2022. That's when Pavlo Anatolyovich Smolyakov, the pastor of the local Golgotha Baptist Church in Kherson, saw a photo of children from the aforementioned children's home on the floor of a municipal bomb shelter, where they were being cared for by the staff of their institution. «The photo was, to say the least, not for the faint of heart. There were a lot of people, the room was dark and damp. The floor was wet, there were mattresses on it, and there were children crawling around, from babies to four-year-olds. They had already spent a night there. And we realised that if these children stayed here for a few more days, it would be the end for them», he said.
The children had been taken to the municipal shelter because the orphans’ doctors and teachers feared that the Russian army would soon take over Kherson, and because rumors about the deportations of children had already reached Kherson..
At the end of April 2022, a man calling himself Navigator, who hid his face behind a balaclava, arrived in Kherson accompanied by armed occupiers and ordered the priest to return the children to the orphanage. The priest obeyed.
«Navigator» Igor Yuryevich Kaskikevich
After this, the Russians dismissed the director of the orphanage for refusing to cooperate with the occupiers. They appointed Tatyana Vasilyevna Zavalskaya (°1953), a local pediatrician, in his place.
Tatyana Vasilyevna Zavalskaya
The so-called Navigator was later identified as Igor Yuryevich Kaskikevich (°1976), who had been appointed secretary of the Kherson branch of United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s party, in 2023. For information: On March 2, 2022, the city of Kherson came under Russian control, but on November 11, Ukraine regained control of the city and the Russian army withdrew. Due to his participation in Russian aggression during the war in Ukraine, Kaskikevich is subject to personal international sanctions from several countries.
In August 2022, two Russian women reported to the Kherson Regional Children's Hospital. The Reuters news agency identified one of them as Inna Gennadievna Varlamova (°1968), an employee of the Ministry of Social Development of the Moscow Region and wife of Sergei Mikhailovich Mironov (°1953), the leader of the Just Russia faction in the Russian Duma. Just Russia is a state-recognised opposition party that accepts Putin's authority. The woman accompanying Inna Varlamova was Yana Valerievna Lantratova (°1988), deputy leader of the Just Russia faction in the Duma. The women showed interest in Ilya Vashchnko and Margarita Prokopenko, two children from the orphanage, aged 6 and 9 months respectively, who were being treated in the hospital for obstructive bronchitis. However, this was a diagnosis on paper, intended to prevent the children from being taken away.
Varlamova and Lantratova insisted that these two children be transported back to the orphanage, although Natalia Pavlovna Lyutikova, the head of the hospital's pediatric department, told them that they could not be discharged because of their high fever. According to Natalia Lyutikova, the Russian woman was very interested in the children and asked questions such as: «Are they nice? Are they good?» and wanted to know if the children had any disabilities. «She also called the director and asked me if she could check the children. I said no, because the children's condition was moderate... After that she called me every day and told me that those children had been selected to be taken to Moscow».
Natalia Pavlovna Lyutikova
But then she said: «One day we went home at 6 p.m. and at 6:30 p.m. the doctor on duty called to say that he had received orders from the acting chief doctor to take the children to the Children's Home - in our hospital car, and the next day they were taken away from there»
The accomplices
The interest in these two children was not accidental. They were two young orphans who were chosen with the help of the new Russian-appointed director of the children's home, Tatyana Vasilyevna Zavalskaya. She also arranged for the children to be delivered from the children's home to the kidnappers and helped them to bring the children from Kherson to the Russian-controlled areas. She had become director because the other six of the seven doctors had left, they did not want to cooperate with the occupiers. Zavalskaya was the only one who did want to collaborate and therefore became head of the hospital.
The order to discharge the children so that they could be taken out of the hospital was given by the acting chief physician, the 70-year-old Viktor Stepanovich Burdovitsyn. Before the occupation of Kherson, he worked as the head of the medical service, and after the arrival of the Russians, he willingly collaborated with the occupiers and became the spokesman of the hospital - he often appeared in propaganda materials, saying that medicine «had nothing to do with politics», and thanking the occupiers for their help.
Viktor Stepanovich Burdovitsyn
Burdovitsyn also gave the Russians access to medical records and personal files of local police officers. These documents were kept in the hospital. After that, it turned out that people had been threatened with detention and further torture in basements. In June 2022, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office informed Burdovitsyn that he was suspected of treason. Although he considered himself not a traitor, and firmly announced to the Russian propaganda media that he would stay in Kherson, he disappeared from the radar at the same time as the Russians, and his whereabouts are unknown
Other people involved in helping Inna Gennadievna Varlamova and Yana Valerievna Lantratova to abduct the children to Russia were Artich Mikhailovich Sat (°1983), an advisor to Volodymyr Vasilyevich Saldo (°1956), the puppet governor of Kherson. Artich Sat was appointed by the Russians as Minister of Health for the Kherson region and he recommended, as a representative of the occupation government, that the children should be taken to the territory of the Russian Federation for «treatment and rehabilitation».
Artich Mikhailovich Sat
Finally, there was the misty Vadm Viktorovich Ilmiyev (°1966) who signed the transfer permit. Ilmiyev was the founder of the charitable foundation «The Good Cause» and the head of the civil organization «Health Insurance Fund». In 2007, all heads of Kherson hospitals, teachers, doctors and librarians had to «voluntarily» become members of the organization «Health Insurance Fund». The fund entered into an «obligation» to transfer an amount of 5 hryvnia from each salary to the fund of a public organisation. This contribution was considered mutual assistance in case of emergency, to which all employees of the public sector of Kherson could apply. The result of the scam was that money was collected annually, but when it was really necessary to provide assistance, no one was ever allocated any money.
Vadim Viktorovich Ilmiyev
Ilmiyev signed the above-mentioned transfer permit together with the already mentioned Tatyana Vasilyevna Zavalskaya.
On June 6, 2023, he was arrested for embezzlement on a particularly large scale. According to investigators, from September 1, 2022 to April 14, 2023, Vadim Ilmiyev, using his official position, stole money in the amount of more than 26.5 million rubles from the Ministry of Health of the Kherson region, intended to pay the salaries of employees of the City Hospital. At the end of March 2023, Ilmiyev left the region and moved to Crimea.
The transfer permit, signed by Ilmiyev en Zavalskaya
The transition
Inna Varlamova, who came to find Margarita in Kherson, is, as mentioned, the wife of Sergei Mikhailovich Mironov, the leader of the Just Russia party in the Russian Duma. Investigators from the British broadcaster BBC discovered that Varlamova arrived in Kherson on the day Margarita was taken from the orphanage and returned to Moscow that same night, and that Margarita Prokopenko was on the same train.
Inna Varlamova and Sergej Mironov
During that investigation, the BBC also found out that the Mironovs suddenly had a 14-month-old daughter. When they got their hands on the child's documents, they saw that the child's name was Marina and that her date of birth was the same as that of Ukrainian Margarita Prokopenko. An official birth certificate was not available, but further investigation revealed an adoption file, which in turn revealed that Margarita Prokodenko had been renamed Marina Mironova from Moscow shortly after her abduction from Kherson, and that her place of birth would have been Podolsk, one of Moscow's largest satellite cities.
Little is known about the fate of the abducted boy Ilya Vashnko. According to Dmitry Valeryevich Lubinets (°1981), the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verchyovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), gave the following statement: «After he was examined in Moscow and diagnosed with an illness, we suspect that the Mironov family decided to reject him because he was ill. But we cannot determine what happened to the boy after that and where he was taken.»
Adoption of Ukrainian children in the Russian Federation is illegal. According to international and national standards, foreigners must notify Ukraine and seek permission before adopting a Ukrainian child. However, Russia is trying to circumvent this by granting the abducted Ukrainian children Russian citizenship without asking.
The Finale
On the eve of the liberation of Kherson by the Ukrainian armed forces in October 2022, Navigator Igor Yuryevich Kaskikevich returned to the orphanage. At that time, there were still 48 children in the orphanage. After all, the teachers had been able to return some of the children to their parents or relatives, since rumours had been circulating for a long time that they would all be taken to Russia.
On October 21, 2022, on a Friday that could only be called Black Friday, buses, ambulances, armed Russian soldiers, propagandists and hitherto unknown «volunteers from Crimea» arrived at the orphanage. With the active help of director Tatyana Vasilyevna Zavalskaya, the Russians took all the children in the direction of Crimea, which they occupied. One of them was Maksim, the three-year-old half-brother of Margarita Prokopenko.
The main character of the crime was again Igor Kashkevich. There are charges and an international arrest warrant against Kashkevich personally. In addition to the crime of taking Kherson orphans, the Security Service of Ukraine also charged him in March 2023 with holding a pseudo-referendum on «the accession of the Kherson region to the Russian Federation».
Igor Kaskikevich on October 21, 2022
«There is international law, there is humanitarian law, there are treaties that clearly state that an aggressive state that is on another territory has no right to take and transport children. Under no pretext! Even if, according to them, this is an 'evacuation' or 'rescue'», explains the Ukrainian statesman and advocate for children's rights Mikola Mikolaiovch Kulaba (°1972). «What Russia is doing to children is a war crime and genocide. And we have irrefutable evidence of that. All these videos and photos will be or have already been handed over to the relevant authorities, to international organizations, for the future tribunal. There, Putin and his henchmen will watch these videos and explain what they did.»
Russia claims that all evacuated children will be returned to Ukraine. But so far, only one child from the Kherson orphanage has been returned. Ukraine will not have to count too much on the help of the Russian Federal Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Alekseevna Lvova-Belova (°1984). She herself «adopted» a child who was abducted from Mariupol and she is quite proud of it, as you can see in the video that you can watch via the arrow below.
