A Mariupol resident, Yevhen, is a former contract soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the father of three children. After Yevhen divorced his wife, twelve-year-old Matvii, seven-year-old Sviatoslava, and five-year-old Oleksandra stayed with him. After the outbreak of a full-scale war, Yevhen, together with his children, hid from shelling in basements in Mariupol for a month, and then they and other residents of the city were “evacuated” by the Russian military. Yevhen ended up in a colony in Olenivka, and his children – in a boarding house near Moscow, from which they were almost sent to a foster family.
“I begged that my children were told that I was alive”
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