The Stolen Children — Watch the Full Episode
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As Russia systematically deports or forcibly transfers Ukraine’s children, an American combat veteran joins the fight to bring them home and share the firsthand stories of the children who escaped.
The Stolen Children is a 39-minute episode of the documentary series Faith in War, from the team behind the award-winning film A Faith Under Siege. It follows Meaghan Mobbs — combat veteran, West Point graduate, and president of the Romulus T. Weatherman Foundation — as she travels to Ukraine to investigate reports that Russia is deporting or forcibly transferring Ukrainian children on a massive scale. What she uncovers, alongside investigators, government officials, and our own rescue teams, is a documented system built to erase who these children are.
What you just watched
Ukraine has documented, name by name, more than 19,000 children deported or forcibly transferred by russia. Children are taken from filtration camps, hospitals, and occupied towns. Their documents are altered, their language forbidden, their identities systematically replaced.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, specifically for this crime — the forced transfer of children of one group to another, which is enumerated as an act of genocide under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The film gives voice to the children living that reality: Illya, rescued from occupied Donetsk by his grandmother Olena after losing his mother to Russian shelling; Oleh, held and interrogated for two months after organizing a teenage resistance cell; Valeriia, taken to a Crimean “recreation camp” and cut off from her family for nearly two years before escaping through a humanitarian corridor; and Marta, who lived under occupation where simply being Ukrainian was treated as a crime.
Our role in the film
Throughout the film, Mobbs works alongside our rescue teams — the frontline missions that go into Russia and occupied territory to locate stolen children and bring them home. Our founder, Mykola Kuleba, Ukraine’s former Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, is among the investigators and advocates featured, describing the falsified documents, changed names, and stonewalling from Russian authorities that make every rescue a race against time.
Since 2014, we’ve provided the only full cycle of support for Ukraine’s stolen children and their families — rescue operations inside Russia and occupied territory, document restoration, family reunification, trauma recovery, and long-term reintegration. To date, we’ve rescued 1,763 children and teenagers from Russia and temporarily occupied territories.
Every child in this film has a name. So do the thousands still waiting.
