Incredible detective: how Putin’s associate adopted a girl kidnapped from Ukraine

Sergei Mironov, a 70-year-old Russian political party leader, is listed in the adoption records of a two-year-old girl. Girl in 2022 took the woman whom S. Mironov is now married to. Records show that the girl’s identity was changed in Russia.

On Thursday, S. Mironov denied the report that he adopted a girl forcibly taken from a Ukrainian orphanage.

S. Mironov called the BBC investigation “a hysterical fake provoked by the Ukrainian special services and their curators from the West.”

Without commenting on the specifics of the BBC report, he said it was an information attack aimed at discrediting him.

Kidnapped from Kherson orphanage

The girl, named Margarita, was one of 48 children who disappeared from the Kherson regional orphanage when Russian forces took control of the city.

They are among an estimated 20,000 children the Ukrainian government says have been taken by Russian forces since 2022. the beginnings of a large-scale invasion.

Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and his child rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for allegedly illegally deporting Ukrainian children to Russian-controlled territory in order to permanently remove them from their country.

The Russian government says it is not deporting Ukrainian children but evacuating them to protect them from war.

The BBC worked with Ukrainian human rights researcher Victoria Novikova to find out what happened to Margarita and the other children. V. Novikova prepared a file of new evidence for the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine, which will forward it to the International Criminal Court.

The mysterious story began when in Kherson Children’s Hospital, where in 2022 in August, a 10-month-old girl was being treated for bronchitis, and a woman in a lilac dress appeared.

The youngest child in foster care

Margarita was the youngest resident of the local orphanage. These orphanages cared for children with health problems whose parents had lost custody or had died.

BBC/I.Kastiukevičius photo/Margarita Prokopenko

Margarita’s mother gave up custody shortly after her birth, and her father’s whereabouts were unknown.

Dr. Natalija Liutikova, who heads the infant’s treatment at the hospital, said she was a smiling baby who loved to cuddle with people.

A woman in a lilac dress introduced herself as “the head of children’s affairs from Moscow”, recalls doctor N. Liutikova.

Kherson – now back under Ukrainian control – was then in its sixth month of Russian occupation.

Men in military uniforms came to pick up the girl

Shortly after the woman left, Liutikova says she received multiple calls from a Russian-appointed official who was recently appointed to run the orphanage. The official demanded that Margarita be immediately returned from the hospital back to the orphanage.

A week later, Margarita was discharged from the hospital. The next morning, the orphanage staff were asked to prepare her for the trip.

“We were afraid, everyone was afraid,” said the nursing home nurse Liubovė Saiko.

She described how Russian men – some wearing military-style camouflage pants, one with black glasses and a briefcase – came to collect the girl.

“It was like something out of a movie,” she said.

But that was just the beginning.

BBC/I.Kastiukevičius’s photo/Russian parliament member Igoris Kastiukevičius (left) organized putting children on buses

Seven weeks later, Igor Kastiukevich, a member of the Russian parliament dressed in military uniform, arrived at the orphanage and, together with other officials, began organizing the deportation of the remaining children, including Margarita’s fake brother Maksim.

“They took them from our hands and took them away,” said L. Saiko.

In the video, published by I. Kastiukevičius in Telegram, it is seen how children, dressed in outdoor clothes, were carried to buses and ambulances and taken away.

“The children will be taken to safe conditions in Crimea,” said I. Kastiukevičius, when the children were being put in the car. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014. I.Kastiukevičius described this action as a humanitarian mission.

The midnight train

The BBC, in cooperation with Viktorija Novikova, spent five months trying to find Margarita and the other 47 children.

Finding missing children in such a huge area as Russia – more than 17 million. km² in the country is not an easy task.

The first job was to identify the mysterious woman in lilac clothes who visited Margarita in the hospital last August.

Victoria found a Russian document authorizing Margarita to be transferred to a Moscow hospital for medical examinations. The document indicated a woman: Inna Varlamova. Searches on social networks confirmed that she was the mysterious woman in lilac clothes.

BBC photo/”Woman in lilac clothes” (center), later identified as Inna Varlamova

Then the BBC showed I.Varlamova’s photo to N.Liutikova and she recognized her as the same woman who visited Margarita in the children’s department.

After further searches, the BBC discovered that I. Varlamova works in the Russian parliament, although it is not clear in what capacity, and owns property in Podolsk, near Moscow.

Part of the mystery was solved. But questions remained.

“Margarita did not need special tests,” said N. Liutikova, speaking about the night when the child was taken. “Why should a small child be taken so far?”

Using the surname of Inna Varlamova, the BBC’s Panorama program obtained train recordings from sources in Russia. From them it turned out that she arrived in occupied Ukraine on the same day when, according to witnesses, Margarita was taken from the orphanage.

Later that night, at 00:20, I. Varlamova returned to Moscow by train with additional round-trip tickets.

Evidence suggests that Margarita was taken away on this midnight train.

But why?

The Russian source provided another important piece of information: a document showing that I. Varlamova had recently married the leader of a political party, Sergei Mironov.

Former paratrooper S. Mironov is the leader of the “Just Russia” party, a part of the Russian state-sanctioned opposition, and supports President V. Putin. It is sanctioned by several Western countries, including the United Kingdom and the EU.

Then the essential details became clear.

The BBC has seen a birth record of a 14-month-old girl named ‘Marina’ made last December. The child’s parents were named Inna Varlamova and Sergey Mironov. The record was in disarray, with no original record of the child’s birth.

Marina’s date of birth was given as 2021. October 31 – the same day Margarita was born.

“When I saw that Marina’s birthday coincided with Margarita’s, I knew: bingo!” said Victoria.

Reuters/Scanpix photo/Sergej Mironov

Through Russian sources, the BBC team obtained a record of Margarita’s adoption. Margarita Prokopenko was renamed Marina Mironova, after her adoptive father Sergey Mironov. Her place of birth is Podolsk.

The Russian government said it had no knowledge of Margarita’s case and could not comment.

Adoption decrees

The Geneva Convention, which defines what constitutes a war crime, states that it is illegal to deport civilians during wartime, except when necessary for security or important military reasons and is temporary. The Convention also prohibits changing the child’s family status.

When the ICC indicted President Putin and his Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova earlier this year, the court said that hundreds of Ukrainian children were illegally deported from orphanages and orphanages “in order to permanently remove these children from their own country.”

This happened after President Putin’s decision to issue decrees that made it easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children.

Ms. Lvova-Belova said that Russia takes children only to foster homes or foster care institutions.

“We don’t have adoptions,” she said last month. – This is a very important fact, because adoption means that the child becomes completely local. You can change his last name, first name, patronymic [antrąjį vardą]it is possible to change the place of birth.”

But the Russian government, in response to a BBC investigation, said it was incorrect to say that Russia was preventing the adoption of Ukrainian children from the newly declared regions of Russia. She said that she now considers a large part of Ukraine as Russian territory, and the people living there, including children, as her citizens.

The BBC wrote to Sergey Mironov and Inna Varlamova, asking where Margarita is now, but they did not respond.