The film tells the story of the evacuation of around 3,500 orphaned children and their accompanying adults from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to Turkey at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The transportation, accommodation and care of the children on the Mediterranean coast were undertaken by the charitable foundation of Ruslan Shostak, a Ukrainian businessman and owner of the VARUS and EVA chains, whose net worth in 2021 stood at US$140 million. Ruslan Shostak is also the head of the Retail and Logistics Group within the Business Council under the President of Ukraine. The project to evacuate children to Turkey was named ‘Childhood Without War’.
After two years in Turkey, the children were visited by an inspection team comprising representatives of the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine and other Ukrainian and foreign officials. A report prepared following the visit and obtained by ‘Slidstvo.Info’ documented gross violations of children’s rights — psychological and physical abuse — and two underage girls returned home pregnant. The project was shut down, and the Ukrainian police took up the case based on the findings.
This investigative film will tell the story of what happened to the children during the evacuation, as well as the role of the responsible adults in this story.
