How the War Destroyed the Orphanage in Oleshky

Before the Russian invasion, there was a boarding school for special children in Oleshky, Kherson Oblast. The institution was considered one of the best in Ukraine: orphans and special needs children who require complex specialized care went there. They not only received the necessary help here, but also trained skills for independent life — they went hiking and played sports. In 2020, Marina Litovchenko, a graduate of the boarding school, won a gold medal in table tennis at the Summer Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

After the occupation of Oleshky, Russian authorities removed 84 pupils from the boarding school — despite the fact that many of them had parents or other relatives. Now the institution has effectively ceased to exist in its former form, and the fate of some of the children remains unknown. IStories tells what is known about the boarding school and its residents.

The piece is based on the New Lines Magazine story together with The Reckoning Project

The beginning of the war and the occupation

Many residents of the Oleshky Specialized Boarding School were bedridden or wheelchair-bound. When the shelling started, the staff of the orphanage brought children with wheelchairs and medical equipment down to the basement. The most difficult thing was to secure children with crystal deposition disease — a rare genetic disease that causes bones to become brittle and any movement can lead to a fracture. An attempt to put pants on a boy with this diagnosis resulted in two broken legs.

The children could not be evacuated because of the rapid advance of the Russian army, but some of the children were taken away by their relatives, said Vadym Reutsky, a teacher and sports coach at the orphanage. By October 2022, 85 people, 35 of whom were adults, remained in the institution, he said.

“Almost all the children had relatives who used to call them, me and other boarding school staff. But communication in the occupation was deteriorating day by day, and at one point we had no way to communicate anything outside at all,” Reutsky says.

At the beginning of the war, some of the staff quit, leaving about 100 of the 178 employees to work. Food and medical supplies began to run out, Russian shelling destroyed the city’s gas pipelines, and the orphanage was left without gas. In April 2022, Oleshky was occupied.

“From the very beginning of the occupation, there were rumors among the staff that Ukraine would evacuate us, but all attempts failed at the planning stage,” Reutsky says. According to him, everyone realized that it was only a matter of time before the boarding school came under the full control of the Russian authorities.

The director of the boarding school, Tatyana Knyagnitskaya, refused to cooperate with the occupation administration, and on October 10, 2022, she was dismissed. The new head was Vitalii Suk, the former head of the driving school, who “could not even suppose that he would ever be the director of the orphanage.”

The transportation of pupils

In October 2022, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in the Kherson Oblast. The occupation authorities began to curtail the work of schools, colleges and social institutions in Oleshky and remove them from the region. On October 21, Vadym Reutskiy received a call from one of the pupils informing him that they wanted to be taken away. When Reutskiy ran to the boarding school, he found there medics from Russia-annexed Crimea, who observed the children and put them on lists.

That day, the first 16 children were taken out of the boarding school in Oleshky. At that time they were from 6 to 18 years old, all of them could move independently or on a wheelchair. According to the document signed by the new director of the institution Vitalii Suk, they were transferred to Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No. 5 in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea.

“I think they chose these particular children because they were the easiest to look after. They took the ones that were convenient to take,” Reutsky said.

On November 4, 12 more children were taken from the orphanage. A week later, the remaining 56 children were transferred to the Nadiia Rehabilitation Center in occupied Skadovsk, which was not adapted for children with such diagnoses — it did not have the appropriate equipment.

In the Russian-controlled institution, children with special developmental needs from the Oleshky boarding school celebrate Russian Flag Day, meet with employees of the Investigative Committee and learn to fly drones.

Children in Russia

In November 2023, four children from the Oleshky boarding school were sent to Russia. They ended up in the village of Noviye Berega in Penza Oblast. This is a project of Maria Lvova-Belova, a Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman, and her sister Sofia, which is designed to house people with disabilities. The residents themselves were not asked if they wanted to move to Russia, one of them, Alexander Danylchuk, told IStories.

“I told them that I wanted to leave. And Sonya [Sofia Lvova-Belova] said, ‘Well, maybe you’ll get used to us?’ I said ‘Sonya, how old am I? Am I 10 years old? How can I get used to this? I have friends there [in Ukraine], I have foster parents.’” he said.

Former pupils of the Oleshky boarding school still live in Noviye Berega and meet Maria Lvova-Belova. Neither Lvova-Belova herself, nor her sister Sofia, who runs the Noviye Berega project, nor Tatyana Moskalkova, the Russian Commissioner for Human Rights, have responded to IStories inquiries about the fate of the Ukrainians. The occupation Ministry of Social Protection of the Kherson Oblast refused to answer the publication’s request, citing the confidentiality of information. “Dissemination of personal data is possible only after authorization for processing by the subject and owner of personal data,” stated in the response of the department.

Attempts to return the children

The pupils of the Oleshky orphanage were moved between different institutions — transported from the occupied territories to Russia and back. This complicated the search process for relatives, many of whom were not informed about the children’s transfers. Some of the children ended up in Crimea, others in two orphanages in Krasnodar Krai. By February 2023, the children were brought to occupied Skadovsk.

A year later, an international coalition for the return of Ukrainian children began to operate. With the mediation of Qatar, representatives of the UK government and the UN, several hundred children taken to Russia were returned to Ukraine.

However, most of the children from the Oleshky boarding school were left without parental care, and this complicates the procedure: Russia agrees to return the children only to blood relatives.

Some pupils were taken away without notifying their relatives. This was the case with 22-year-old Anton Volkovych, who was diagnosed with a serious neurological disease at an early age. He had been living in the Oleshky boarding school since 2014, requiring a wheelchair and constant medical care. During the occupation, his mother, Hanna Zamyshliaieva, was in contact with the staff of the boarding school, who told her about the state of her son’s health.

In the fall of 2022, Zamyshliaieva lost contact with the boarding school. Only in November she was informed that her son had been moved to another place. Zamyshliaieva was shocked: according to her, no one asked her permission to transport Anton. “I don’t know what is happening to him: what state his brain is in, how he is being cared for. I don’t even know if my son is alive,” she says.

On November 5, 2022, some parents received a text message from the occupation authorities of the boarding school that their children were being evacuated, but the children’s names were not given. The relatives of Artem Parakonnyi, a 16-year-old boy with a neurological disease who had been living in the Oleshky boarding school since he was 12, also received such a message.

The next day Medynska decided to get to Oleshky and look for her grandson herself. She had to get to the boarding school by boat from the other side of the Dnipro — before the war it took 20 minutes by bus. After crossing the river, Medynska found out that she was too late: the staff said that her grandson had already been taken away, probably to Skadovsk.

Once in Skadovsk, Medynska learned that Parakonnyi was not there — he had been sent to Russia, to an orphanage in Krasnodar Krai. Medynska spent the entire winter trying to get her grandson back. In February 2023, he was brought to Skadovsk, but the director of the institution, Vitalii Suk, refused to give Parakonniy to his grandmother. In late March, Medynska did pick up her grandson and traveled home through Russia, Belarus and Eastern Europe. In total, the process took five months. Now Parakonnyi lives with his mother and grandmother in Kherson, which is under constant shelling by Russia.

By October 2024, only ten children from the orphanage in Oleshky had been returned to Ukraine, at least one of them an adult. Most of them were returned to Ukraine by their relatives on their own. It is also known that six children died in the occupation. According to educator Vadym Reutsky, among them is a boy with a heart defect, who was scheduled for surgery in Ukraine but did not have it done because of the war.