The Ukrainian teens who took on Putin's gulag archipelago - and won

[Emrys]

When Vlad and his friends realized the Kremlin would not return them home, they staged an open revolt.



I
Camp Druzhba
November 2022

As the sky began to darken, Vladyslav Rudenko slid a pair of underwear into his hoodie and pretended to go for a walk. The 16-year-old Ukrainian boy had to hurry. He only had a slim window of time before the lanterns lit up the campgrounds of the reeducation camp, potentially exposing him to the Russian counselors.

He left his dorm alone around 6 p.m. and wound through the campus enclosed by a two-meter-high fence topped with barbed wire. He arrived at an outdoor stage overlooking an open square where the camp’s children were required to gather every morning to sing the Russian national anthem. Vlad climbed up the stairs of the stage, dodging the security camera pointed right at it, and turned right toward a row of flag poles: a rainbow flag for the camp; another for occupied Crimea; and the blue, red and white flag of Russia.

“Why should that be hanging there?” he thought to himself. The Russian flag didn’t represent him, a boy from the Ukrainian city of Kherson. It represented the armed men who took him from his home in balaclavas. What really belonged there, if not the Ukrainian flag, was his underwear.

Vlad did one last scan to ensure no one was around and then grabbed the rope on the flagpole. He untied it and tugged, lowering the Russian flag as fast as he could. Once it reached the ground he unhooked it, fastened his underwear and hoisted it up the 4-meter pole. He felt his eyes popping out, his heart dropping to his stomach — the flagpole was so high — and then, a resistance. Vlad looked up and saw his blue and white checkered boxers hanging in the twilight.

https://www.politico.eu/article/save-ukraine-children-russia-war-camps-return-home/

Teenagers can be legendarily rebellious, and none more so that Ukrainian teens kidnapped like thousands of others, incarcerated in a series of Russian camps and subjected to clumsy attempts at forced assimilation.

“They were trying to break us,” said Vlad. “And we were breaking them in return.”

A long read, but an important story about indomitable people.

[tanyev]

1. Thanks for posting this. Can't wait to read it all.

I thought at the time when they were taking Ukrainian children that the older kids at least would give them hell.