INTERVIEW
Olena Zelenska: Our fight for the Ukrainian children stolen by Putin
Desperate parents regularly write to the first lady, pleading for help. ‘As a mother, I don’t know how I would cope,’ she says of the kidnappings by Russia’s troops
Olena Zelenska said the idea of children being taken from their families was her worst nightmare as she called on the world to help the thousands who have been taken across the border
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The Times
There is only a hint of fatigue in Olena Zelenska’s steely green eyes to show she carries the weight of a thousand mothers searching for their children on her shoulders.
She remembers the very first child she realised had been taken by Russian troops, a teenager named Serhii, kidnapped from his village in Chernihiv in the first weeks of the invasion. As the war progressed, more and more stories began to emerge.
“In the very first months of the full-scale invasion, reports of terrible incidents with children started appearing,” she recalls, speaking as part of an interview given exclusively to The Times and Channel 4, to be broadcast on Monday night as part of the documentary Dispatches: The Hunt for Ukraine’s Stolen Children.
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