Deported Ukrainian teen allegedly commits suicide in Russia

Ukrainian-born Oleksandr Yakushchenko, 18, who was deported from the Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast in 2022, was found dead after allegedly committing suicide on Jan. 10, 2024 near his foster home in Russia.

His suicide almost a year ago was first reported by IStories investigative project on Dec. 24. There were no reports about investigations into Yakushchenko's Russian foster family, where at least one other Ukrainian boy currently lives.

According to IStories, before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Yakushchenko lived in a family-type orphanage in the village of Tokarivka near Kherson, run by Lidia Sharvarly.

After the occupation of the village early into the invasion, Sharvarly became a collaborator with the Russian authorities. When the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated Kherson in November 2022, she fled to Russia, illegally taking several children with her.

Yakushchenko was among at least 20,000 Ukrainian children that have been abducted from Russian-occupied territories and sent to other Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine or to Russia itself, according to a Ukrainian national database "Children of War."

In Russia, Sharvarly refused custody of children, and Yakushchenko was placed in a Russian foster family of Natalia and Alexander Lukashenko in Krasnodar Krai.

Eight months later, he committed suicide.

The family denied their responsibility for the teen's suicide since he was legally an adult at the time of his death.

“He was just staying with us. We gave him food, well, you can't kick a guy out. He had nowhere to go,” said his Russian foster father Alexander Lukashenko.

A media report says that Yakushchenko told his mother in Ukraine about his plans to visit her a month before he died, but his foster family might have taken away his ID to prevent him from traveling to Ukraine, according to his friends.

The boy's biological mother, Olena Yakushchenko, who lives in Khmelnytskyi Oblast of Ukraine, does not believe that her son decided to commit suicide.

“I do not believe that he hanged himself. I talked to him, he was happy. What could have happened in a week or two?” says the young man's mother.

The teen's younger sister, Khrystyna, was also deported to Russia and currently lives with a foster family there. Her mother doesn't know what happened to her.

The Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets estimates that Russia has unlawfully deported up to 150,000 Ukrainian children, while other officials put the figure at 200,000–300,000.

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