Kyiv
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Rostyslav Lavrov knew he had to escape. He was stuck at a Russian naval academy in occupied Crimea, where he was sent at the age of 16 after Moscow’s forces took over his hometown in Ukraine’s Kherson region. The school had even tried to give him a new – Russian – birth certificate to cement his transformation into a Russian.
He was determined not to let that happen. So, one day in October 2023, Lavrov said he walked out of his dorm, and embarked on a secret journey back to Ukraine.
Now 19 years old and living in Kyiv, Lavrov is one of the roughly 2,000 Ukrainian children and teenagers who have returned to their home country afterbeing either forcibly…