A senior Russian officer who defected to the West has revealed how he saw the Kremlin’s security services kidnapping children in Ukraine.
Igor Salikov, who served as a major in the GRU military intelligence agency, witnessed children being taken away by FSB officers in 2022.
Salikov has provided evidence of alleged Russian war crimes to the International Criminal Court (ICC), including accounts of women being raped by Vladimir Putin’s forces.
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After testifying about Russian atrocities, Salikov – who served with the Wagner mercenary group during his military career – was granted asylum by a country in western Europe.
Seeing Ukrainian children being kidnapped by Russians
The 62-year-old veteran said that he “personally saw children being taken from Ukraine” several times.
In the Bucha region, Salikov said he saw children being driven north to Belarus, where many of the invasion’s logistical operations were handled. He suspects the infants were later transported to Russia.
“One particular instance was when my unit was on a recon mission. We were hidden, nobody knew that we were there. We were observing the road and we saw FSB cars taking children somewhere.”
Igor Salikov, left, served in varying parts of the Russian military for decades (Photo: Igor Salikov)
Salikov said he had no time to think and assumed they were being evacuated, adding: “You can only start thinking about bigger things when nobody’s shelling you, perhaps when you lie down at night.”
He later realised it made no sense for the FSB to be evacuating these youths.
“It is completely inhumane. Now we know where those children were transported, how the Russian government essentially tried to reformat their brains, and know about the mothers of those Ukrainian children trying to reunite with them. Without a doubt, it is a crime.”
Since the invasion began in 2022, The i Paper has exposed Russian camps used to deport thousands of women and children from occupied Ukraine and investigated the Kremlin operation to brainwash them.
Some 20,000 children have been abducted from their families since February 2022 and held in Russia, Belarus or Russian-held territories, according to Ukraine. A UN commission this month confirmed that 1,200 children had been moved, calling the cases “crimes against humanity“.
In 2022, ‘The i Paper’ revealed that Russia had built a camp for Ukrainians on the country’s south-east coast, amid claims of abductions (Photo: Maxar Technologies)
How Russian soldiers victimised Ukrainian women
Salikov recalled visiting a property in Ukraine where three sisters were living, because he needed to take drinking water from a well in their grounds.
“One of the sisters asked me whether I had any food. I said: ‘I don’t have much, but tomorrow I’m going to get something from my unit, I’m going to bring you back some food.’”
When he went back the next day, he found that the area had been occupied by pro-Russian Chechen fighters, “and one of those women was having sex with them”.
He believes that either the woman was being raped or she had agreed a deal out of desperation “because she was hungry and she just needed food”.
Salikov also learnt about a civilian couple who had been arrested from an official military briefing about the behaviour of other units. “When the husband tried to defend his wife, he was killed. The wife was raped.”
Ukrainian authorities say that hundreds of women and girls have reported sexual violence by Russian soldiers since 2022. The Kremlin claims most cases are unsubstantiated.
Ukrainian women protest in Belgium against rape by Russian soldiers during the invasion (Photo: Thierry Monasse/Getty)
What finally led him to decide to defect
Salikov realised he needed to leave when Russian forces began executing Ukrainians, who he said were accused of being saboteurs and were taken prisoner.
“One of the commanders above me wanted to show initiative and said he would take care of jailing these prisoners. He gave this task to me, but I refused. I heard that some of those prisoners would be executed.
“Counterintelligence officers took several people from us. They told [us] to shoot the rest. I ordered my subordinate to send these people home – to free them.”
At least 170 civilians have been executed in Russian-held areas of Ukraine, the UN stated last year. Many former prisoners have given accounts of being tortured.
Declining to follow his orders caused “a huge conflict” with the commanders of his battalion, who “wanted to court martial me and execute me”.
“That was the final point when I decided to get the unit out and ultimately to defect.”
Salikov believes fellow officers were planning “to make it look like Ukrainian special forces killed me”.
He claimed would-be killers waited for his vehicle, ready to attack it, but his radio operator heard messages about the planned ambush. They travelled in a different car via another route and fortunately they were not recognised.
Ukrainian civilians were killed by Russian soldiers in Bucha, outside Kyiv, in 2022 (Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty)
Salikov, who has written two books about his military career – Russia’s Wagner Group and Putin’s ‘Viper’ Detachment – said he did not harm any civilians.
Following Salikov’s defection in 2023, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor for war crimes, Yurii Bielousov, said at the time that his team had confirmed some of the veteran’s “important testimony” about atrocities he knew of or had witnessed.
The ICC issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for suspected war crimes. Russia denied the allegations and said the court’s actions had “no significance whatsoever”.
The Kremlin claims that it does not target civilians. Last year was the deadliest of the conflict for civilians, according to the UN – with more than 2,500 fatalities, 97 per cent of which resulted from Russian actions in Ukrainian-held areas.