00:01This suburb of Kyiv is made entirely of prefabricated houses.
00:06They're all shelters for people displaced by the war.
00:13Natalia takes care of five children, all of whom have managed to escape Russian-occupied
00:19Ukrainian territories.
00:22Most carry scars from being forced from their childhood homes.
00:2712-year-old Ivan lived with his mother in the Kherson region
00:31when she was killed by a Russian soldier in front of him.
00:37One day a Russian soldier came to our house.
00:42He wanted alcohol.
00:46I was sitting in the room playing with a toy elephant and a teddy bear.
00:52He was talking to my mother.
00:57He wanted to rape her.
01:04Then I heard the shots.
01:09I laid down on the ground.
01:11I heard the gunfire.
01:13After a while, it stopped.
01:16Then he left.
01:21The trauma from that experience means he now speaks with a slight stammer.
01:27I feel so sad for him.
01:30I don't even know how a child can survive something like that.
01:36Having lived through the occupation myself, I can't imagine his pain.
01:42Ivan found himself without a mother or a father.
01:46An NGO helped him flee the region, and he now lives with Natalia.
01:51I hate Russia and what they're doing to us.
01:58We had everything.
02:01The house.
02:02It was a dream.
02:08Then we lived in terror.
02:13Russification has taken a heavy toll.
02:17Valeria, too, has experienced it.
02:19At the age of 16, she spent 550 days in a Russian camp.
02:27As soon as I arrived, they took a picture of me.
02:29There I am in the red scarf.
02:31We were dressed in whatever we could get from humanitarian aid.
02:35The photographer was from Moscow.
02:37He told us how beautiful life was in Russia.
02:43She was no longer allowed to speak Ukrainian.
02:45On her school reports, Russian became her mother tongue.
02:48And Russian history was one of the main subjects taught.
02:52The Russians broke me psychologically.
02:55You don't understand anything anymore.
02:58You spend your whole life learning the same story with the other children.
03:02You speak Ukrainian at home.
03:05And then they come to you and tell you completely different things.
03:08The Russians are very good at propaganda.
03:10My time in the camp became my greatest trauma.
03:13My personality changed.
03:16I'm much more closed now.
03:17I can feel it.
03:21Valeria was able to escape the camp by securing a spot in a humanitarian convoy.
03:26Luckily, Russian authorities didn't hold her back.
03:29Valeria and Ivan don't know one another, yet both share a painful past shaped by the war.
03:35They're two of 2,000 Ukrainian children that have returned from occupied territories.
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