KYIV: A Ukrainian orphan from Mariupol, who was taken to Russia after it captured the port city last year, will be returned to Ukraine in a rare deal between Kyiv and Moscow, they announced on Friday.

The Kremlin has been accused of illegally transferring thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking President Vladimir Putin’s arrest over alleged deportations.

Bogdan Yermokhin, 17, was taken by Russian forces from Mariupol to Russia last spring and — like an unknown number of other Ukrainian children — placed in a Russian foster family.

Moscow said earlier this year that he had tried to escape back to Ukraine but was stopped near the Belarus border.

“Bogdan Yermokhin will soon be in Ukraine!” Ukraine’s rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets wrote on social media on Friday.

“I officially confirm that we have agreements on Bogdan’s return to Ukraine, and his reunification with his sister.” The news came after his lawyers told Ukrainian media this week that Moscow had sent Yermokhin — given Russian citizenship while in Russia — military call up papers, ahead of his 18th birthday.

Moscow confirmed Yermokhin will be returned to Ukraine.

Its children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova Belova — also wanted by the ICC — said on Friday that the teenager will leave Russia via a third country to meet a relative. “The Russian and Ukrainian sides worked on and agreed on a decision on a meeting between Bogdan and his sister in a third country on his birthday,” she said on social media, without specifying the location.

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2023