Russian authorities are beating Ukrainian children as they attempt to “re-educate them”, according to one of more than a dozen teenagers freed from Moscow-run youth facilities after months of negotiation. The parents of more than a dozen children transported to a youth camp on the Black Sea peninsula last year brought them back to Ukraine on Wednesday, the charity that organised the evacuation confirmed. The children, mostly teenagers, were living in Russia-occupied areas of the Kherson and Kharkiv regions when local education authorities suggested sending them to a summer camp in Crimea, which has been controlled by Russia since 2014.

But those operating the camp refused to send them back to their parents when their hometowns were liberated by Ukraine. Save Ukraine, the charity that organised the evacuation said it helped some parents to travel to Crimea, via Poland, Belarus and Russia to retrieve their children. Parents and children were seen hugging and kissing as they arrived in Kyiv. Some of the children were seeing their families for the first time in months. One boy spoke of his mistreatment during a television interview. The teenager, who was not identified, said children from Kherson were punished for expressing pro-Ukrainian views. “We will take you to an orphanage, you will sit there and understand everything,” the boy said a security officer had told him and other teenagers.

He also said he saw a bruise on the back of a teenage girl that had been caused by a stick used by the officer to beat them. The boy added that the camp’s director had told him his parents had given him up for adoption. Distraught, he called his mother, who called camp officials to tell them she had done no such thing. However, administrators allegedly told her: “You’re not going to take them anyway. They will be children of Russia.”

The repatriation was carried out less than a week after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman, over the country’s suspected involvement in the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine’s occupied territories. Putin has not commented on the allegations. Lvova-Belova earlier this week defended the “evacuation” of Ukrainian children and claimed that no parents had demanded the return of their children.

The Ukrainian government says more than 16,000children have been deported to Russia from the occupied territories, while a study by Yale University in the US has identified 43 facilities that are holding some 6,000 children, aged four months to 17 years. Some of their numbers have been sent to orphanages, put into foster care, or offered for adoption, ostensibly after losing or becoming separated from their parents during the invasion.

The Daily Telegraph, London