“He Was Buried in a Day Like a Dog”

Every year, about 220 children who live in foster families die in Russia. These numbers do not include the death of Oleksandr Yakushchenko, a Ukrainian teenager who was born and raised in the Kherson Oblast and spent the last year of his life in foster care in Russia, in the Krasnodar Krai. At eighteen years and seven months old, he took his own life. 

“How do I know why? He wasn’t living under our care. He was eighteen years old, he was an adult child. He just lived with us,” — so answers the question about the reasons for the death of the boy Alexander Lukashenko — the head of the foster family, under whose care Sasha (Oleksandr) was transferred. The incident was not publicly reported neither in social networks, nor in the local media, nor in the guardianship authorities. This is the story of how lived and how died Sasha Yakushchenko — a Ukrainian teenager who survived childhood in a dysfunctional family, went through an orphanage, the war and the Russian foster family.

This story was prepared in cooperation with The Reckoning Project (TRP), an international team of journalists and lawyers who document, report and collect evidence for war crimes investigations. Special thanks to TRP researcher and journalist Victoria Novikova.

Ukraine. Orphanage and war

“The conditions there were harsh to the maximum. We were forced to work very hard. There was a construction site, Sasha and I were plastering together, mixing cement almost every day, summer and winter. It was like some kind of exploitation,” — this is how Serhii Manchenko tells about his life before the war. Together with the deceased Sasha Yakushchenko, he lived in a family-type orphanage [a family with five to ten foster children] in the village of Tokarivka near Kherson, which was run by local resident Lidia Sharvarly. By the beginning of the Russian invasion, in addition to Sasha and Serhii, six other children lived under her care. 

“They were beaten, especially the little ones,” Serhii continues. — “I remember we went to school and were distracted from everything, because at home it was very bad, as bad as possible. When it was the weekend, we didn’t want to go home — everyone was happy that it was the weekend, home, and we didn’t like it.”

When Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, the Kherson Oblast was occupied almost immediately. The head of the orphanage, Lidia Sharvarly, began to cooperate with the pro-Russian authorities, and she was soon appointed the head of Tokarivka and two other surrounding villages. In the fall of 2022, Ukraine returned Kherson, and many locals who had worked for the occupation administration left for Russia. So did Sharvarly, taking with her eight children who were in her care.

The Russian authorities paid a one-time compensation of 100 thousand rubles to the refugees from the Kherson Oblast, but Sharvarly’s children say that they never saw this money: her guardian registered it on herself. For all her minor pupils she could have received 700 thousand rubles in total. “When we came here to Russia, we received the money, and she took everything for herself, as if it were her money,” says Karina Petrenko, Lydia’s former pupil. Her new foster family filed a police report, but the law enforcement agencies did not find any crime in it. 

Lidia Sharvarly herself ignored the messages from the IStories journalist, but we managed to contact her daughter Tatyana. She denies the accusations of both exploiting children and stealing money. “We didn’t treat them as a form of earning money, we really had a family. There was no exploitation, there was no slave system either. [The children] worked, like me, like Lidia Nikolaevna,” Tatyana says about the arrangement of life in the foster family. — “So, they were working and she was sleeping at the same time? Lidia Nikolaevna was always awarded with medals, insignia; she was positioned as the best mother in the Kherson Oblast. She is not the kind of person who can steal anything. When they came to the territory of the Temryuksky District, undressed, stripped, Lidia Nikolaevna paid for it all in full, she had to do it from what budget?”

Tatyana called the question about assistance from the Russian authorities provocative and refused to answer it. As follows from the Rosreestr documents, which are at the disposal of IStories, in January 2023, Lidia Sharvarly and her own family bought a house in the Krasnodar Krai with an area of almost 350 square meters. “She also took Sasha’s help for herself,” says Serhii Manchenko, a friend of the deceased. — “I don’t want to pursue anything. I don’t want to see or hear from her at all, [I want] to forget her just like a terrible dream.” 

Russia. Foster family and death

In Russia, the children were taken to a temporary shelter in the village of Kuchugury in Krasnodar Krai. There, Lidia Sharvarly refused custody of them. “That’s why the orphanage was disbanded. Tired of these lies and falsehoods, these constant ‘nothing to do’, ‘I don’t want to study.’ These kids are capable of making things up, [wanting] to show themselves to be better than they really are,” says Sharvarly’s daughter Tatyana about the reasons for abandoning the children. 

Two of Lidia’s pupils have already become adults, and the remaining six went to three foster families in the Temryuksky District of Krasnodar Krai. IStories found out that the deceased Oleksandr Yakushchenko was under the care of Natalia and Alexander Lukashenko — a foster family with a long history from the village of Akhtanizovskaya. 

Alexander Lukashenko claims that formally the boy lived under their care for only a month, after which he turned 18 — so the Lukashenko family was no longer responsible for him. “He just lived with us. We gave him food, well, you can’t kick the boy out. He had nowhere to go,” says the head of the family. By that time they already had both blood and other adopted children. 

According to Lukashenko, they could not refuse a new child: “We don’t decide. We have a family. We were told to take two, so we took two [in addition to Oleksandr, Rostyslav Dubovik, another pupil of the orphanage of Lidia Sharvarly, was given to their care]. Why refuse, if the guardianship authorities ask? They weren’t needed in that family, and now they’re not needed here either, is that it?” 

At the disposal of IStories there is a death certificate of Oleksandr Yakushchenko. It follows that he died on January 10, 2024 in the village of Akhtanizovskaya, Krasnodar Krai. The cause of death was suicide — Sasha hanged himself a few kilometers from the house of the new foster family. According to the head of the Lukashenko family, Sasha’s body was found by the workers, who were going to the shift in the morning, and next to it was a disassembled phone, from which all the data had been deleted. The medical examiner told the foster parents that the teenager probably changed his mind at the last moment and tried to climb out of the noose. 

Lukashenko says the family organized Sasha’s funeral at their own expense. Here is what several people who attended the funeral told IStories:

“The foster family came, chose the cheapest coffin. When the flowers were placed, they just came up, threw them like a dog. And when it was time to leave, the foster family said, 'Thank God he died. Less problems,” — says Sasha’s friend Olga (name changed for safety reasons). The photo on the grave Yakushchenko’s friends organized themselves. “Elementary at the funeral of the parents had no reaction. Let it is not your child, it is a foster child, but I had tears in my eyes,” — says the mother of another Sasha’s friend Svetlana (name changed).

In response, Alexander Lukashenko says he “doesn't care:” “Fine, let them think that way, do we object? We don’t agree with anything. We won’t even give you permission to write. We have plenty of kids; we don’t need any of this nonsense. We don’t care how you portray us. If it’s wrong, we’ll see you in court.”

“He just felt he wasn't needed on this earth”

When asked about the reasons for the suicide of the teenager, who lived in his house for almost a year, Alexander Lukashenko replies: “We can’t know why, no one reported to us why.” Shortly before his death, Yakushchenko sent a voice message to his friends (available at the disposal of IStories), in which he told about his relationship with his foster family. We publish it with minor cuts: 

“I’m not needed by anyone here, f***. They made me understand that. I’m ruining everyone’s lives. I can’t do it, I’ll hang myself… If I weren’t here, no one would have any problems, f***, if I hadn’t come here. I can’t… F***! I’m in so much pain. I don’t know what to do.”

Sasha’s friends noticed his suicidal moods, even though outwardly he seemed cheerful. “He never showed what he had inside. You could see that he wasn’t getting enough attention, as I was too, I had the same amount of childhood traumas as him. Everything inside is f***ed up, but on the outside he tried to be cheerful,” said his friend from the Ukrainian orphanage, Serhii Manchenko. 

Classmates from Akhtanizovskaya tried to dissuade him from committing suicide. “One time we were sitting in class, and he had in his notebook: ‘I want to die, I want to die,’” says his friend Olga. — “I told him: ‘Sasha, do you realize that suicide is not an option?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, like, I realized everything, I decided that death is what I’m afraid of.’ Well, in the end, it turned out the way it did.” 

Several times Sasha talked to friends about returning to Ukraine to his mother, Olena Yakushchenko. Her children were taken away from her back in 2016. Olena calls it her fault: after the death of her mother, she drank a lot, her husband drank too. Since then, according to her, she has not seen Sasha, but continued to communicate by phone. 

“He called me often, after a day, after two. Regarding the war, of course, he was crying, freaking out because they were taken out,” Olena says about communication with her son. — “He called before the New Year, saying I would come soon. And in January I was already informed about it [about the death of her son]. I can’t tell you how it feels to lose a child. I want them to figure out how my son died.” 

According to the new foster family, Olena’s communication with the deceased Sasha was far from so rosy. “Nobody needed him, Sasha, neither in life nor in death. His own mother called him on 18th birthday, said: you live well, and we are poor here. To say such a thing to a child at the age of 18!” — resents Alexander Lukashenko. Sasha also told about the conflicts with his mother to two friends IStories spoke to as well.

Conflicts continued in the new foster family: one of Sasha’s friends told IStories about at least one case, when Lukashenko’s family took away his documents. It is unknown how many times this happened. Probably, the guardianship authorities were aware of this practice. “The guardianship said that he wanted to go back to Ukraine, they took away his passport, and he went and hanged himself because of that,” says Karina Petrenko, who was raised with him in a Ukrainian orphanage. 

“He just felt he wasn’t needed on this earth. His birth mother could only insult him, humiliate him, and the foster family did not even begin to sort out why he did this to himself. He was buried in a day, like a dog, and that’s all,” says Nadezhda, the mother of Oleksandr Yakushchenko’s friend (name changed).

“I wanted my child to be found and brought back, because they had already killed one of them”

The deceased Oleksandr Yakushchenko has a sibling — Khrystyna. She was sent under guardianship to another family in the Temryuksky District of Krasnodar Krai, although the Family Code of the Russian Federation prohibits the transfer of siblings to different guardians, except when it is “in the interests of the children.” 

IStories found out that the girl studies in a correctional boarding school in Temryuk. Her birth mother Olena Yakushchenko does not know what is with her daughter: “After Sasha’s death, we started looking for Khrystyna. Because while Sasha was alive, I learned everything about Khrystyna through Sasha. Of course, I wanted my child to be found and brought back to me, because I understood that they had already killed one of them.” 

In Ukraine, both Sasha and Khrystyna are officially considered missing (update: Ukraine launched criminal proceedings for committing a war crime resulting in the death of a person after the IStories’ publication). Khrystyna’s current guardian Snezhana Kolesnikova refused to talk to us. 

The other children, who before the war lived in Lidia Sharvarly’s family orphanage in the Kherson Oblast, also remain in Russia. Serhii Manchenko is studying at the Maritime State University in Novorossiysk. When asked about the war, he says: “I support Russia’s interests. As for the special military operation, I feel neutral about it — neither here nor there, it’s all the same to me. I also wanted to go back to my family. My dad is in prison, and my mom is far away, abroad, in Poland. But where would I go, and what would I do there? I’m already studying here.”

Karina and Alina Petrenko are now adults and have become parents themselves. Their younger sisters Nadia and Sasha continue to live in a new foster family in Krasnodar Krai. 

In Russia, Karina plans to get an apartment: “Now I’m finishing 11th grade [in school] and I’m going to study nursing in Anapa. We applied for a [housing] certificate, but we were denied because my registration was Ukrainian. Yet, my Russian passport states that I am a citizen of the Russian Federation, not Ukrainian.” Karina’s birth mother stayed in Kherson, they do not keep in touch. “She started saying, like, we’ll bring you back and all that. I said: no, I don’t want to. There is nowhere to go back, everything is broken there. What’s the point of going back there? If something was still intact there, then yes.” 

Rostyslav Dubovik, who came into Lukashenko’s foster family together with deceased Sasha, is still in their care and studies at a maritime college in Crimea. He refused to communicate with IStories. 

After the death of Oleksandr Yakushchenko, an article about the Lukashenko family was published on the Temryuksky District website. It was titled: “There is enough love for everyone.” The article states that there is “always an atmosphere of kindness, comfort, and care for one another,” yet it does not mention that one of their pupils had taken his own life. A few months after Sasha’s death, another child was placed under Lukashenko’s guardianship, according to two individuals familiar with the family’s situation.

IStories sent inquiries to the guardianship and custody department of the Temryuksky District of Krasnodar Krai, the local Interior Ministry department and the head of the district, as well as to the Krasnodar Krai prosecutor’s office and the commissioner for children’s rights in the region. The Temryuksky District Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs redirected the request to the Investigative Committee; the other authorities had not responded to our inquiries by the time of publication.

Featuring Rita Petrova and Dmitry Velikovsky

If you know anything about the fate of children taken from Ukraine to Russia, please write to the author of the investigation Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya at bonchosmolovskaya@istories.media