A Belarusian woman sent her son to summer holidays in Chelyabinsk. But the grandmother decided not to return the child

Olga Panova, a resident of Belarus, spent more than a year trying to get her son back, who went to his grandmother Galina for summer holidays in Chelyabinsk and did not return home. The Kalininsky District Court of Chelyabinsk finally ruled that the child should not be returned.

Olga, her husband Vladimir, and their son Ivan lived in Belarus. After the divorce, the parents agreed that the boy would stay with his mother. The father went to Russia to his place of registration. In the summer of 2024, after the end of the school year, the son went on holiday to Chelyabinsk to his paternal grandmother. His mother bought him a return ticket, but the child did not come home.

Russian authorities appointed the grandmother as Ivan’s guardian. Olga claims that she was not informed about this and that she was only able to review the document in court in 2025 when she arrived in Chelyabinsk from Belarus — grandmother Galina, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit to recognize the boy as a child left without parental care.

The grandmother has her own truth — she explained that Olga and Vladimir are Jehovah’s Witnesses. This religious organization is banned in Russia as extremist but operates legally in Belarus.

According to the grandmother, her grandson claimed that he often skipped school classes because he attended meetings and congresses instead; that homework was replaced by reading the Bible, and communication with peers was not welcomed; and that when he openly expressed unwillingness to participate in community affairs, his parents, according to him, reacted with “authoritarianism or even physical violence.”

Now the grandmother, who works as an accountant, lives with her grandson. The teenager attends a private school, goes to a radio engineering club, and paints impressionistic pictures. He told a management specialist that he shares the lifestyle his grandmother provides him, and when his parents were mentioned, he “tried to minimize the conversation.”