For four years, Hanna Zamyshliaieva has agonized over the fate of her severely disabled son, who disappeared in southern Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion.
On Tuesday, she and two other women whose loved ones are among hundreds of Ukrainians missing from residential schools and other institutions made clear that they are not giving up.
“I am here to fight for the return of my child,” said Ms. Zamyshliaieva. “I don’t know where my son is, what’s going on with him, what condition he is in and if he’s still alive.”
Ms. Zamyshliaieva, joined by another mother and a grandmother, had come to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to publicize their cases at a news conference. Their family members, all in their 20s, had been in a specialized residential care home in the town of Oleshky, in the southern province of Kherson, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, they said. They were later transferred without any communication with their families, the women said.
The deportation of Ukrainians by Russia, many of them much younger than the care home residents who were the subject of the news conference, has been one of the most painful issues of the war for many in Ukraine and an intractable point of dispute between the warring parties.
Ukrainian officials say that 19,500 Ukrainian children were forcibly transferred or deported from schools and institutions across a large area of territory after the Russian invasion. The deportation of some of them to Russia was cited in a war crimes arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and an aide, Maria Lvova-Belova.
Mr. Putin and Ms. Lvova-Belova made public announcements about what they said was their efforts to rescue children from the war zone and give them homes in Russia. Yet the forcible transfer of children during a war is a potential war crime, and the I.C.C. has said it is investigating the cases of “at least hundreds” of Ukrainians taken from schools and children’s homes.
“We, parents and grandparents, want our children to be returned home,” Larysa Branytska, whose granddaughter is missing, said at the news conference Tuesday. “They are disabled, but we would like them to live a normal life.”
Ms. Zamyshliaieva, 45, pleaded for information about her 24-year-old son, Anton Volkovych, asking people to contact her personally — “even by pigeon post” — if they did not want to go to the authorities.
“No one will say where he is,” she said.
After Anton was born, he underwent multiple operations, Ms. Zamyshliaieva said. And he still needs regular checkups with a neurologist and regulation of his medication.
“I understand he could not be alive,” Ms. Zamyshliaieva said, “I have lived with that for four years.”
Ms. Branytska, 61, said she was searching for news of her granddaughter Maryna, 22. Born premature with cerebral palsy, Maryna needs a wheelchair, she said, but thrived at the Oleshky home, where she made a lot of friends.
Ms. Branytska visited her regularly before the war but was unable to reach the home under the Russian occupation.
“I saw her all the time,” she said, welling up with tears. “She was smiling, clapping — and then it was all gone. My soul is hurting.”
She dismissed Russian claims that they had rescued the young Ukrainians. “They did not save the children, they took her,” she said.
Oksana Oliinyk, 54, said her daughter Anna, 26, also used a wheelchair. At first after the invasion, she said, she was able to talk to her by cellphone. But then Anna lost the phone, and her mother had to rely on others at the home for news about her.
At one point, she learned, Anna fell sick. Then the residents she was talking with were moved to another home and the communication dried up.
“That was Nov. 23, 2025, and I don’t know now how she is,” Ms. Oliinyk said.
The news conference was arranged by the Emile Foundation, a Netherlands-based humanitarian nonprofit.
The record of what happened to the residents of the Oleshky residential home is far from clear, but the foundation announced Tuesday that it had succeeded in tracing 46 of them. Of 101 who once lived there, only 13 were reclaimed by their parents at the onset of the war, said Maria Lebedieva, project manager for the group.
Over months, foundation officials said, mostly through personal contacts, they tried to trace the movements of the others. They found that four had died in the first two months of the war, and that the remaining 84 were moved to other homes under Russian control, the group said.
The three residents whose family members appeared at the news conference were moved as part of a group two months after the outbreak of war to another residential home. A year later they were moved again to a third home in the district of Henichesk, in the part of southern Ukraine, which is occupied by Russian troops.
Three others, the foundation said, were placed in a care home in the Russian town of Penza, and the rest remain in institutions in the occupied southern region of Ukraine.
No international humanitarian organization such as the Red Cross has visited the residents from Oleshky, said the co-founder of the Emile Foundation, Mariam Lambert, a former diplomat.
Returning them to Ukraine has been complicated by bureaucracy and legal protocols, as well as their need for a specialized medical evacuation, she said.
“Even when you trace and locate them, there is no international mechanism to return them,” she said.
“We need a trusted humanitarian channel,” she said. “We need trusted intermediaries, and most importantly, we need people to be engaged in a way that goes beyond the diplomatic deadlock.”
Natalia Yermak contributed reporting from Kyiv.
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