Like any proud mother, Maria Lvova-Belova is always posting photos of herself with her son.
There are beaming selfies, cuddles in the sunshine, and pictures with the whole family.
“My boy, I love you very much!”, she writes next to the social media snaps. “The happiness in the eyes of this big child is what fills my life with new meaning.”
The love is publicly reciprocated by her adopted child Filipp, who calls Maria his “beloved mother”.
“She is the best person I could have met in my life. I love her very much. She is my true mother, she is like magic,” the 18-year-old has said. “It is unimaginable how much she has done for me.”
It’s a relationship many parents of teenagers would be envious of – but the truth behind this story of maternal love is much darker and troubling than it appears.
Maria Lvova-Belova embraces her adopted Ukrainian son, Filipp (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
Lvova-Belova has become known as President Vladimir Putin’s “child snatcher”. Described as “evil” and a “fanatic” by researchers monitoring her actions, the glamorous politician has been tasked by the Russian President to oversee the forced deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children and the operation to brainwash them into becoming ideal Russian citizens.
It was during a trip to the war-torn Ukrainian city of Mariupol in 2022, that Lvova-Belova spotted a child she liked the most from a group and decided she would take him home.
“I realise that I am truly growing attached to a child from the group,” Lvova-Belova says, speaking in a recent Russian Youtube video. “And really considering adopting [him].”
Filipp had been living with a foster family after his mother died. He was 16 when he was snatched and taken to live in Lvova-Belova’s family home.
“It was difficult for my son to get used to a new life in the family and in Russia, our rules and traditions,” she says of the teenager.
She recalled how the young Ukrainian attempted to hide and stay away from his new family, that he said he wanted to go back to his own country and that he missed his home and friends. They ignored his pleas. Instead, they began to indoctrinate him into Russian life, including making him consume Russian films and books, as well as exposing him to the Orthodox Church and Russian traditions.
The true record of Filipp’s traumatic abduction is not known, although friends and relatives say the boy was taken by Russia against his will.
And Filipp is not alone. He is one of around 19,500 children taken from Ukraine and placed in Russian institutions and foster homes, with some forcibly adopted and given new identities. This illegal transfer of young people is a war crime and has led to the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Lvova-Belova and President Putin.
President Putin meets with the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in 2022 (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
Lvova-Belova’s role in the mass abduction of these children has been logged by investigators at Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.
Last month, The i Paper revealed how the Trump Administration was axing funding to this programme sparking outrage on both sides of the Atlantic from politicians and religious groups. The US President reversed his decision and agreed a six-week extension which has allowed the Lab to share its intelligence with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Europol.
And Yale have no doubts about the key role Lvova-Bevlova has played in this war crime: “Next to Putin himself, Lvova-Belova… is the most prominent figure responsible for the design and execution of the programme. Her responsibility for the programme has shaped some of its most consequential top-level policies.”
Who is Maria Lvova-Belova?
In Russia, Lvova-Belova is presented as the country’s greatest mother with her ten adoring children. Her official title is the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights and she was appointed by Putin in 2021, becoming responsible for all under 18s across the Federation.
“You have very good experience, a lot of it – both in public work and in family work, raising your own children,” Putin reportedly said to Lvova-Belova when he made her appointment.
“The mission is extremely noble… I wish you success with all my heart,” he added.
Lvova-Belova comes from Penza, a typical city in western Russia. It was there she entered local government after being employed as a guitar teacher and working with children. From there, she rose into the Russian equivalent of the Senate.
Lvova-Belova began her career as a guitar teacher (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
“She is, in some respects, a bit of a nobody,” says James Nixey, who leads the Russia-Eurasia programme at Chatham House. “She has not had exactly a prolific career.”
Nixey says she stands out because of her dedicated belief in Putin’s vision for Russia.
“She would appear to be a true believer [and] quite frankly a fanatic.”
While her CV may prompt some to dismiss her, Nixey says the impact Lvova-Belova has on Russia’s mission to eradicate the Ukrainian identity is not to be underestimated.
“She’s an effective administrator. She has got the tools and the support to do a lot of damage as far as de-Ukrainianising Ukraine is concerned.”
Baking cookies and abducting children
A key part of Lvova-Belova’s role is how she presents herself and the message that sends to Russian citizens.
Photos and videos examined by this paper from her channel on Telegram (a social media app popular in Russia) paint a clear picture.
At home, she shows herself baking cookies with her children for Lent and watching their dance recitals, posting from her seat in the auditorium that she will “ask [my daughter’s] Guardian Angel to help” bless the performance.
At work, she kisses babies and hugs grieving war widows. She sits in meetings under portraits of Putin and opposite stern looking men in suits while smiling and wearing flowery pastel dresses, pearl earrings, with her blonde hair neatly pinned back.
Lvova-Belova highlights her role as a mother, baking and supporting her children at dance shows, as well as her role as mother to all of Russia’s children (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
Karolina Hird, the Institute for the Study of War’s Russia deputy team lead, says the aesthetic is very deliberate.
“She weaponises her identity as a mother and as a woman and someone who presents in a very kind of gentle feminine way to her advantage,” she explains.
“She presents in a very traditionally feminine and almost maternal sense… where she can say, ‘Oh, I’m a mother. I have so many children. I’ve adopted so many children. My life revolves around children’ in a way that distracts from the fact that she’s committing and enabling crimes of international law.”
This perception does not stretch into Ukraine.
Hird explains: “She’s seen, in my belief, rightly so, as a very evil person… the kind of Ukrainian perception of her is the woman who steals the children.”
Mykola Kubela, founder of Kyiv-based charity Save Ukraine, which helps to bring Ukrainian children back home, believes Lvova-Belova is working to assimilate these abducted children as quickly as possible to hide them.
“She weaponises her identity as a mother and as a woman and someone who presents in a very kind of gentle feminine way to her advantage”
“[She is aware] every Ukrainian stolen child is the witness of war crime… they can be a witness in a tribunal, in any court, about war crime, a crime against humanity. What Russia is doing now in occupied territories is genocide. It’s a cultural genocide.”
Lvova-Belova was not just earmarked for her role because of her maternal appeal, good looks and ability to work quickly. The politician’s religion and romantic relationships have also proved helpful to the Kremlin.
A fervent follower of the Russian Orthodox faith, she embodies many values promoted by the Russian state. This was first solidified by her marriage to Pavel Kogelman, an Orthodox priest, with whom she has five biological children and a number of adopted children.
Last year she married oligarch Konstantin Malofeev in a glamorous wedding ceremony. Her new husband is one of the most powerful media figures in the country, whose TV company, Tsargrad, is profoundly pro-Orthodox and pro-Putin. Nationalist Malofeev has been sanctioned by the international community since 2014.
In March, she posted a smiling photo of the pair of them in occupied Ukraine, which she refers to as a “new region” of Russia.
Lvova-Belova poses with her new husband, the sanctioned oligarch Konstantin Malofeev (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
“Donbass is a sacred place for the whole country and for our family. At the end of the business trip to new regions, my husband and I met in Donetsk. Each of us has our own ministry here: mine is helping children and families, and he is the Donbass Volunteer Union.”
Reflecting on Lvova-Belova’s new spouse, Hird explains: “Lvova-Belova’s proximity to traditional Russian family values, how that’s enabled by the Russian Orthodox Church, and her proximity to big sources of Russian nationalist power makes her a really interesting and unique person in the wider Kremlin ecosystem.”
“It means she is someone who’s very appropriately suited to orchestrate these sorts of crimes.”
How Russia changed how it talked about stealing children
Lvova-Belova’s Telegram channel is very active, offering her 40,000 subscribers regular updates on her work helping children in need in Russia, as well as showing her actions in the occupied territories or elsewhere in Ukraine.
Analysis by this paper found there was a change in the messaging around the forced relocation of Ukrainian children following the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Lvova-Belova and Putin in 2023.
Posts before the warrant used plain and direct language about Russia’s plans to move children over the border into Russia and to remove their Ukrainian identities.
One message, for example, praised the “simplified mechanism for issuing Russian citizenship to orphans and children without parental care from the DPR, LPR [occupied Ukrainian regions] and Ukraine”.
Lvova-Belova vists a girl from Donetsk in Ukraine, who was taken to a camp in Moscow (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
Hird corroborated The i Paper’s findings, saying “on the Russian side I think they’re being quieter about it. There’s less reporting on, for example, adoptions since the arrest warrant went out.”
Recent posts are more ambiguously worded. For example in March this year she posted: “We opened two youth centers in Makeyevka and Mariupol… [there were updates on] how children who were taken under guardianship in different regions of Russia live.”
Another from last month reads: “I started my trip to the Luhansk People’s Republic by meeting with its head, Leonid Pasechnik. I spoke in detail about the life of orphans taken into care by foster families from different regions of the country,” it read.
While the language in posts about these potential war crimes may be muted, Hird highlights that Ukrainian children are still being moved into and around Russia. A post on 30 March from another official Russian Telegram channel talked of children from Luhansk being taken to a “sanatorium” near Moscow for “rehabilitation”.
Will she ever face justice?
Lvova-Belova has not spoken frequently about the arrest warrant or the international condemnation of her work to abduct Ukrainian children.
Her Telegram makes references to ‘Western lies’ or ‘misinformation’, and at times she has remained defiant, writing in a comment that “no sanctions or arrest warrants will stop us”.
A year on from that remark, her attitude appears unchanged.
Putin’s Children’s Rights Commissioner spoke last month to a famous Russian Youtuber in a ‘tell-all’ interview which has been viewed almost 300,000 times.
It touched upon her impending arrest – with Lvova-Belova making light of the ICC’s warrant.
Lvova-Belova in a picture from her Instagram (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Instagram)
Questioned about the “enormous number of awards” she has amassed over the years, she quipped, “I have mostly arrest warning and sanctions. I have plenty of that.”
In another reply, Lvova-Belova mentions she has no need to travel abroad and risk arrest as there is plenty to see in Russia.
It is only in a third comment during the interview that a more serious response is forthcoming.
“At first, I did not pay attention to it [the ICC warrant]… I was only comforted that I was paired with the President. As long as I am paired with the President, most likely I won’t go to jail. This really comforted me.”
She added that she now wears the warrant as a badge of honour.
“When we started to trace the causes, grounds for accusations, my pride manifested here… because you understand that the work you did for your country was noticed by a huge number of people,” she said, adding the warrant is part of the “negativity and demonisation of Russia.”
Lvova-Belova claims she now must have a constant security guard and that her family have been threatened – although she does not provide any details.
She remains steadfast that her actions will be on the right side of history, telling the YouTube interviewer “these kids suffered a lot, they stayed in bomb shelters, did not have enough food, they did not see the light, did not proper medical help” and so “we came there and saw them in temporary camps: frightened children, who hide under the bed at every loud sound. We realised that they need parents to warm them.”
Lvova-Belova poses in part of Ukraine. She said the photo was taken during a trip working in “our four new regions” of Russia (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
At no point does she reference the reason for the trauma happening to the children is because her country started a war against Ukraine.
Whether she will ever face justice at The Hague remains to be seen.
The return of Ukraine’s 19,500 missing children has become a key part of peace negotiations. Even if Russia agrees to hand them back, in the years that have elapsed some children have turned 18 and entered the Russian military, while the younger victims may have forgotten who their real families are. It is understood the youngest child to be taken was only eight-months-old.
From hatred to indoctrination
Many of the children stolen from Ukraine have been given new names and identities which means tracing them could prove impossible. That, of course, is not the case for Lvova-Belova’s own adopted son, Filipp.
Putin’s ‘child-catcher’ does not speak as a woman who believes he or any of the thousands of abducted children will ever return to their Ukrainian families and friends as she believes they are now Russian.
Filipp is congratulated in front of the cameras by his adoptive mother as he receives his Russian passport (Photo: Lvova-Belova/Telegram)
Speaking on the Youtube show, Lvova-Belova reflects on the journey Filipp has undergone, saying there was a time when she realised her “adopted child hates Russia [and] hates everything related to it”.
She blamed his feelings on the anti-Russian “ideology” of Ukraine and now, after three years of indoctrination, her son is a different person and one who holds a Russian passport.
Lvova Belova said: “Now I look at Filipp and realise it was worth it… He is a man who loves his country.”