Ukrainian Teen

Ukrainian Teen

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July 11, 2022 / 9:25 AM
/ CBS News

Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine — All over Ukraine , amid Russia's brutal invasion , people have gone missing. Experts say abductions and forced disappearances are part of a Russian military tactic aimed at terrorizing communities and demoralizing civilian resistance to Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion. As CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams reports, they have forced families to become detectives.
Williams met 16-year-old Vlad Buriak just after he made it home following what he said was nearly three months in captivity. His family say he was a child prisoner of Russia's military, and the allegations over his detention could amount to war crimes.
Last week, Vlad was finally reunited with his father, Oleh, who told CBS News he feared he'd never see his eldest son alive again.
Vlad told Williams he was taken captive by Russian troops in April as he evacuated from Melitopol with other civilians. The city on Ukraine's south coast is now under Russian occupation.
He said that when Russian soldiers stopped the car in which he was trying to flee at a checkpoint, they threatened to kill him. Instead, he told Williams, the troops took him to a jail in occupied territory, where he was held for several weeks.
Vlad showed CBS News a map he had drawn of the prison, including rooms used as an office by the occupiers, a shower room, and what he described as a "torture room."
He claims he witnessed the Russian guards torturing other Ukrainian prisoners. CBS News cannot independently verify Vlad's story, and he said he was not tortured himself, but he gave a detailed account of being put to work cleaning the room he says was used for torture.
Inside that room, he said he saw "a lot of blood," and one Ukrainian prisoner hanging from the ceiling by his hands. Another prisoner told the teenager that he'd been tortured with electric shocks.
Vlad said he had heard the sounds of torture himself: People crying out in pain, begging for help.
Oleh, Vlad's father, is a senior Ukrainian official in the region, and he claims the Russians knew that and held his son hostage hoping for a prisoner swap. Oleh said the Russian troops were stealing everything they could in occupied territory, from washing machines to toilets, and even children.
What the Buriaks say happened to them is not an isolated incident. Ukraine's government is reportedly investigating hundreds of forced disappearances since the Russian invasion began.
Oleh told CBS News that he negotiated directly with the Russian side to secure Vlad's release, but he didn't want to share the details, because he hopes that what happened to his teenage son will be prosecuted as a war crime .
For the time being, he's just trying to enjoy the first calm he's felt in months, now that he has his son back.

First published on July 11, 2022 / 9:25 AM

© 2022 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright ©2022 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

'I try to not cry': Teen refugee copes with leaving parents in Ukraine 04:13
Among them is 17-year-old Alla Renska, a tall girl with long blonde hair, carrying her hot pink backpack from class to class.
But Renska is no ordinary student, and she is no longer living an ordinary life -- or the life she envisioned just weeks ago.
Back then, Renska was studying for college exams in her home city of Kyiv, Ukraine , with plans to become an English and Turkish translator.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine changed all that.
"We heard explosions and our house was shaking," Renska tells CNN.
That's when her parents made the agonizing decision to send her to safety, out of the country.
She still can't believe how quickly her life has changed since the Russian invasion. "It's (the) 21st century, it's Ukraine, it's Europe, why?"
Renska's parents arranged for her to stay with good friends in Hungary as they remained behind in Ukraine to care for her elderly grandmother, who is too frail to travel.
Alla Renska, pictured here with her parents in Ukraine.
"I will never forget that day," she says, recalling the crowds of people who were sheltering in the subway for protection from falling artillery. "Oh my God, so many people were there!"
When Renska arrived at the train station, the crush of the crowd prevented her from saying goodbye to her father. She was shoved onto the train and that was it.
"I cried," Renska recalls, "maybe all night."
Not long after the train left, an air raid siren sounded. Her father had to sleep in the station, not knowing if her train was safe. He wouldn't hear from her until she got to Hungary.
Renska took few photos during the journey -- only ones showing a bleak landscape that she says matched how she felt.
It was during the train journey that she decided to write an email to Korosi Baptist High School, one of Hungary's top schools.
She wrote about the war and explained what had happened to her. She also told them of her accomplishments.
"I won competitions in the history of Ukraine, the Ukrainian language and foreign literature," Renska wrote. "And I have already written three scientific papers at the Kyiv branch of the Small Academy of Sciences in 2020, 2021."
She ended her email with a plea, "I really want to go to school and continue studying!!! I kindly ask you to help me."
She dated the letter, "The 10th day of the war in Ukraine."
Renska took a few photos during her train trip to Hungary. She says the bleak landscape matched how she felt fleeing her homeland.
School officials launched an appeal among parents of the school community, raising about $90,000 to convert some spare shipping containers into dorm rooms with bedrooms, bathrooms, showers and a small kitchen outside the main school building.
These containers are now where Renska sleeps and studies.
She spends her days in classes and learning a new language -- Hungarian.
Nights are spent in the dorm room with a few other teenage girls who also recently fled Ukraine and were welcomed in by the school.
Renska says she likes living so close to the school and having the chance to meet other students from Ukraine.
"In Ukraine I had an incredible class and wonderful teachers. And here are also extraordinary people," she says, adding that they are "wonderful people who have become my family."
The principal of Korosi Baptist High School says it now has enough space to house 12 more students from Ukraine in the coming weeks.
Containers at the Korosi Baptist High Shool have been converted into dorm rooms for Ukrainian refugees.
The school has also provided the girls with a psychologist, a Russian woman, who helps them cope with the trauma they've experienced.
Despite that trauma, Renska says she tries to remain stoic.
"I try not to cry and I try to be strong because my parents, I know that when I cry it makes them feel not very good."
That strength is on display when Renska video calls her parents. It's all smiles as she updates them on school and work.
Her mother, Indira Renska, says that she cannot explain how she feels with her daughter so far away.
"It's too painful (to talk about)," Indira says. "I love her very much. That she is safe now is the main (thing) for me."
A photo Renska's parents sent her right after she left Ukraine, showing the first spring flower to push through the snow near her house.
After the call ends and her mother hangs up, Renska's brave facade falters and she begins to cry.
"It's so unfair that I should be here and my parents there," she says.
Nonetheless, she is determined to stay optimistic.
"I just would like a normal life," Renska says, believing that one day she will be able to return to Ukraine, where she can go back to making goofy videos with her friends, taking selfies and to playing the bandura, a classic Ukrainian instrument that has become a symbol of her country's fight for its existence.
For now, she holds on to a photo her parents sent to her right after she left. It shows the first spring flower to push through the snow near her home. A sign, they say, of brighter times to come.
© 2022 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved. CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.
By Laura Dolan and Matt Rivers , CNN
Updated 2328 GMT (0728 HKT) April 4, 2022
Budapest, Hungary (CNN) It's a normal school day for students at the Korosi Baptist High School in Budapest, Hungary -- studying, presenting classwork, laughing with friends.

Janet Elise Johnson teaches political science and gender studies at Brooklyn College. She is the author of “ The Gender of Informal Politics ” and “ Gender Violence in Russia .”
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Amid the maelstrom of the Trump-impeachment proceedings, Ukraine has been less a reality than a projection of America’s post-Cold War neuroses. Although we have learned something about Volodymyr Zelensky , Ukraine’s neophyte President, there has been very little said about the lived experiences of the country’s nearly forty-four million people.
One of the strongest states in Europe a millennium ago, Ukraine has had a devastating century, including two forced famines, first under Lenin, in 1921 and 1922, and then under Stalin, a decade later. Since Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, it has faced several severe economic depressions and ongoing violent meddling by Russia. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in eastern Ukraine, leading to nearly fifty per cent inflation the following year and to more than ten thousand civilian casualties and the internal displacement of some one and a half million people. In their long conflict with Russia, Ukrainians have not been submissive: they burned their own fields and livestock to resist Soviet rule; raised two revolutions, in the pursuit of democracy, after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.; and have fought Vladimir Putin’s invasion, despite lacking a functioning military at the start of the conflict. With the country’s economy unable to recover, many Ukrainians have been forced to work or move abroad, to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and even Russia.
The Israeli photographer Michal Chelbin has made images of Ukrainian teen-agers at two different locations during two distinct periods: first, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, in 2008, and then in and around Kyiv, in 2019. Each time, her subjects were on the precipice of adulthood, attending their high-school graduation, an event that includes a prom. Our view is that of an outsider, although Chelbin’s father was born in western Ukraine, and she grew up fascinated by the black-and-white portraits that he had brought with him when he left as a child. In some of Chelbin’s photographs, the teens re-create those old styles: a subject stands, for instance, with a hand resting on the shoulder of a peer sitting nearby. Unlike teens in the U.S., the young men’s dress varies quite a bit, from tuxedos or conventional suits to brightly colored jackets or uniforms. The young women wear ball gowns or more casual short skirts.
From the photos, we cannot tell whether the teens are Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking. One of the results of the war with Russia has been a stronger civic identity. Russian speakers in Ukraine-controlled territories have become more committed to Ukraine, and Ukrainians as a whole seem more open to Russian speakers—including to Zelensky, who won in a landslide.
A few of these teens, Chelbin told me, are students from an internat , a Soviet-style boarding school that serves mostly poor or under-parented children. Others attend public schools. Some of the teens are pictured as heterosexual couples, but not all of them—though none are likely to be out-and-proud L.G.B.T.Q., even as participation in this year’s Kyiv Pride was nearly double last year’s and as Zelensky offered lukewarm support.
Unlike a prom in the United States, graduation proms in Ukraine include students, teachers, and parents and follow an official school ceremony. Graduates stay up all night and watch the sunrise from an important, scenic locale in their community. Until recently, students usually wore graduation sashes—traditionally red with golden letters—only on the last day before the exam period, known as the Day of the Farewell Bell. But in Chelbin’s photographs from 2019 some of the graduates chose to wear them to their graduation prom, now in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Since the last revolution, more young people have been wearing these colors, and embracing traditional textiles and hair styles, in their daily lives.
Teens are, in their developmental stages, driven by hormones. Surprisingly, Chelbin’s photos are relatively unsexualized. According to Vlada Nedak, who leads mother-daughter workshops in Ukraine for Project Kesher —an organization that seeks to promote Jewish community and gender equality—young people’s knowledge about their bodies comes from the Internet, often from pornography that kids first see in grade school, and includes even fewer empowering messages about consent or women’s rights to pleasure than in the United States. These days especially, teens are focussed on their visual representation, as so much of their lives are lived online—even in Ukraine, where the average income is less than a tenth of what it is in the U.S. Chelbin’s photos, however, are not performative in the ways of most young people’s photos in the twenty-first century—the emotiveness is paradoxical and emerges from what isn’t shown.
These pictures should make us think about the possible futures of these young people, and of their country. Parts of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine are still under Moscow’s control, and the rest of the region is struggling to rebuild from the war. In Kyiv, Ukraine’s biggest and richest city, teens have been found living in tunnels underneath the infrastructure that was built for the 2012 European Football Championship. One in five of those who age out of the internat system end up in prison; one in ten attempt or commit suicide. In some parts of the country, rates of H.I.V. infection are higher than in the rest of Europe. Conscription for men, a Soviet legacy, was scrapped in 2013 but then reinstated just a year later, owing to the war. Women, too, have volunteered in greater numbers, and bans on women in combat and military leadership were recently lifted. Jobs, especially working-class ones, are few and underpaid, though they have a new resonance following the Russian invasion, as illustrated in a new documentary, “ Heat Singers, ” about heating-utility workers who sing folk songs in national dress. There are also unexpected new jobs, such as de-mining the Ukraine-occupied areas of the Donbass, a tedious but important job done predominantly by women. Experts estimate that it will take decades to make this region safe again for the common pastime of mushroom hunting.
There is another future possible in this era. Young people have been mobilized by grassroots activism, which sprung up out of the Revolution of Dignity, in 2014, centering on issues such as fighting corruption and supporting the environment, feminism , and the war effort. According to Emily Channell-Justice, the head of Harvard’s new Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program , “Ukraine is at a point where young people are trying to build the world they want to live in, but they are limited by the economic instability they inherited from previous generations and an unending war caused by an aggressive neighbor. They are making change wherever they can, whether at the institutional level or in their own communities and everyday lives.”
Chelbin’s photos elicit the timelessness of portraiture but also the timeliness of this moment, inviting all of us to reflect. Looking at the eyes of the young people photographed in 2008, before the global turn to illiberal populism, with its demagoguery and myopia, we can wonder what has happened in both their and our lives over the past decade. Looking into the eyes of the recent graduates, we draw back and see that we have to enter into the third decade of this new millennium with a commitment to try better for them.
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