The fight for Margarita

A Russian politician is raising an abducted Ukrainian child. Her legal guardian has spent four years trying to bring her home.

Darina Repina is the legal guardian of two biological sisters. One of the girls, Anya, has lived with her for over six years. The other, Margarita, was separated from her by Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

When Margarita was less than a year old, she was abducted by Inna Varlamova, the soon-to-be wife of Russian politician Sergey Mironov, and Yana Lantratova, then a Russian lawmaker and now Vladimir Putin’s human rights commissioner. In an interview with Novaya Gazeta Europe, Repina spoke about how she brought the two sisters into her family, how the war tore her apart from her youngest daughter, and why she continues to fight for Margarita’s return.

In August 2022, two Russian women arrived in Ukraine’s occupied Kherson region: Inna Varlamova, who would soon become the fifth wife of A Just Russia party leader Sergey Mironov, and then-State Duma deputy Yana Lantratova, who was appointed as Russia's human rights commissioner in May 2026. After touring local orphanages, they selected two small children: two-year-old Ilya Vashcheno and 10-month-old Margarita Prokopenko. The story of Mironov's family adopting the girl was first reported by investigative media outlet IStories in 2023.

In early September, the women left via Crimea, taking the children with them. To make everything appear legitimate, local collaborators drew up letters of authorisation for them. The documents were signed by Vadim Ilmiyev, the occupation-appointed head of the regional health department, and Tatyana Zavalskaya, the acting chief physician of the Kherson Regional Children’s Home.

Margarita was soon adopted, renamed Marina Sergeyevna Mironova, and even had her recorded place of birth changed to Podolsk, outside Moscow. She’s now being raised in the household of the 73-year-old Russian politician.

Meanwhile, Darina Repina, Margarita’s official guardian, has spent the last four years searching, fighting, sending official inquiries, and appealing to world leaders. She’s also been writing letters to her younger daughter for her to read one day.

“Hello, Margarita. We're waiting for you. We're so glad the moment has come when you're reading these words … We hope so much that this moment will come soon. We will never let you go.”

The fate of Ilya, the other child abducted alongside Margarita, is unclear. IStories reported in 2023 that he had been issued a new birth certificate, which indicated he was in the Moscow region.

According to the Ukrainian website Children of War, run by the National Unity Ministry and the National Information Bureau under the President's Office, between February 2022 and May of this year, 20,570 Ukrainian minors were forcibly taken to Russia.

‘A chance at motherhood’

Before the war, Darina ran a successful car rental business in Kherson. Her fleet operated across Ukraine, and the income afforded her a comfortable life. Once the business was running smoothly, she decided to devote herself to something bigger.

Darina became both a volunteer and a sponsor for a Kherson-based nonprofit called Life, which supported women in difficult situations, such as those whose parents or partners opposed their decision to have a child. Some of the women she worked with had given birth in prison. Many of them abandoned their children after getting released, simply because they had nowhere to go.

One day, a former inmate named Yana Prokopenko came to see her. According to Darina, she was a beautiful but deeply unhappy young woman.

“She told me, ‘I want an abortion,’” Darina says. “I replied: ‘Yana, you have to understand — God has given you a chance at motherhood.’”

After a long discussion, Yana agreed to keep the baby on one condition: that Darina would always support them.

Yana was a drug addict. When she was seven months pregnant, she overdosed, and doctors had to perform an emergency C-section to save the baby.

Anya was born tiny and extremely weak, her heart barely beating. Doctors not only worked to stabilize her condition but also treated her for alcohol and drug withdrawal, which had led to delays in her physical and cognitive development. Little by little, the newborn grew stronger.

“Anya was almost three,” Darina recalls. “She was living with her mother, and our organisation was helping them along. Then one day her daycare teacher called to say Anya hadn't shown up.” It turned out that both Anya and her mother had disappeared.

It took Darina six months to track them down. When she did, Yana and her boyfriend were both high, and the man had active tuberculosis. 

“And in the middle of all that filth and darkness was a three-year-old girl, pale and starving,” she says. “I called the police and social services. They took Anya away.”

The girl spent a month in the hospital and was then sent to an orphanage. Darina visited her twice a week.

“She would come into the visitation room and ask me, ‘Mom, you’re going to take me home, right?’”

‘Let’s go home’

One day Darina realised she couldn’t sleep knowing Anya was out there in the orphanage. “That morning I told my husband I wanted to take her in,” she says. “He wasn’t on board, but by that point it hardly mattered — we were already headed for divorce, for other reasons.”

What did surprise her was her own mother’s opposition to the idea. “‘You already have a daughter,’ she kept saying. ‘You have Tereze.’”

Darina went ahead anyway. She received the guardianship papers on 13 February 2020. When she drove to the orphanage, Anya came running out to meet her. Then they returned to Darina’s home, where she’d decorated with flowers and filled a room with toys for her new daughter.

“14 February was the first morning Anya woke up under our roof, and we've always called it her second birthday,” Darina says. “My husband didn't leave straight away, but he made life miserable. He wouldn't let up: 'Send her back, send her back.' We eventually split for good.”

Darina’s biological daughter Tereza, however, embraced Anya. “I tried to help her understand why Anya would be living with us,” Darina recalls. “She looked up at me and said, ‘Mama, am I getting a little sister?’ I told her no — actually, Anya’s a month older than you. ‘Oh!’ she said, lighting up. ‘I’m getting a big sister!’ It was the sweetest thing. The girls are both 10 now.”

Margarita’s birth

Yana Prokopenko's life continued sliding downhill. She gave birth to a boy, Maksim, whose health was even worse than his older sister's. During the war he was taken by Russian forces from a Kherson children's home. The last known trace of him surfaced in 2024 in an adoption database posted by a Simferopol children's home. His biological grandmother has established guardianship and is waiting for his return.

Not long after, Yana was pregnant again. This time, the only thing that would persuade her to stay clean was Darina's promise to take the baby. The family picked out a name: Margarita. On 31 October 2021, as soon as Yana gave birth, she signed a statement formally relinquishing the child. Darina filed for guardianship at the same time, with priority claim since she was already raising the baby's biological sister.

“The girls and I went to the maternity ward,” she recalls. “I saw Margarita and knew right away: she was ours.”

Darina began the guardianship process, completing the necessary courses and visiting Margarita often while the paperwork was finalised. She says the staff always let her in, knowing the bureaucratic process would soon be finished and the girl would go home to her big sister. In the meantime, the baby was transferred from the hospital to a children's home.

War and separation

In February 2022, the guardianship paperwork was in its final stages, and Darina’s family was getting the house ready to welcome Margarita. Then the war began. Darina and the girls were in Hola Prystan on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, while Margarita was in a children's home on the western bank. When the fighting cut off river and road connections between the towns, Darina panicked and began calling the children's home. Director Olena Kornienko kept her updated on the situation and on where her child was.

The children's home had no proper bomb shelter. A local Baptist pastor, Pavlo Smolyakov, offered his help, and 58 children under the age of four, along with their caregivers, moved into the basement beneath the church.

Meanwhile, soldiers were looking for the little ones, and rumors spread through the city that they intended to take them to Russia.

By phone, Darina arranged for volunteers to bring dairy products from a local factory and meat and bread from a store called Ferma. Other local business owners supplied food, wet wipes, diapers, toilet paper, water, and more.

The children were kept in hiding for over a month. During that time, 10 of them were collected by relatives. In late March, the director and several staff members were fired for refusing to cooperate with the occupying authorities. A pediatrician, Tatyana Zavalskaya, was appointed to run the facility in their place. Shortly afterward, soldiers arrived at the basement and ordered the children to be returned to the orphanage building.

“The new director's tone was very different — she kept reassuring me there was nothing to worry about and that the children were fine,” Darina recalls. “When I asked how I could go about picking up Margarita, she told me I'd need to contact the military administration and sort out the guardianship issue through the new authorities. 'Ukraine no longer has any authority here,' Zavalskaya told me.”

Meanwhile, the war grew more terrifying by the day. Darina decided to get Anya and Tereza out, planning to return for Margarita once she had sorted out the paperwork, since she still didn't have the final Ukrainian guardianship ruling in hand. She put the girls in the car, took the cat and dog and a few belongings, and on 1 April the family left Ukraine for Poland, then onward to Greece.

Margarita’s abduction

“Mom, we’re coming back, right? We’re not leaving Margarita there?” Darina recalls Anya asking, struggling to hold back tears. She tried to explain that they had to follow legal procedures and obtain the necessary documents before they could get her sister. Even if they went to the orphanage and took the child, they wouldn’t be able to leave the country — they would have to live in hiding.

From abroad, Darina continued contacting the orphanage director, Tatyana Zavalskaya, who gradually became colder and more bureaucratic. By August, Darina says, she began to feel a growing sense of dread.

In October 2022, she was still being told that the orphanage would be evacuated to Crimea and that Margarita’s situation would be resolved there. Only in 2023 would she learn the truth: that Margarita had been taken to Moscow on 2 September.

“Why do you keep looking for her?” Zavalskaya asked during one of their last conversations, according to Darina.

“What do you mean, why? She’s my child. I’m almost done with the guardianship process. Her sister is waiting for her,” Darina replied.

“There was an evacuation — a convoy was hit. We don’t yet know who survived and who didn’t,” Zavalskaya said. The words terrified Darina, but she says she never believed Margarita was dead. She kept calling, convinced the child was no longer in the orphanage.

In November 2022, Kherson was liberated. Three weeks earlier, Russian forces had taken all of the children from local orphanages to Russian territory.

Darina reached out to acquaintances, hospitals, and anyone else she thought might be able to help, but information was scarce. Eventually, a nurse connected her with journalist Viktoria Novikova of The Reckoning Project, who helped her find Margarita and uncover how the children had been taken. The key detail was Margarita’s unchanged date of birth.

“I knew it in my gut — Margarita wasn’t dead, they were trying to deceive me,” Darina says. “After I found out she was alive, I started dreaming she was by my side. During the day, we’d go to the beach, and I would see her in every child running and playing. I was searching for her everywhere.”

‘I will never give up on her’

On 28 November 2023, Darina Repina finally received official documents confirming her status as Margarita Prokopenko’s legal guardian. Since then, she has been sending formal requests to the Russian authorities, but they’ve gone unanswered.

At first, she wrote to Russia’s human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova, but since the post was taken over by Yana Lantratova — one of the people directly involved in Margarita’s abduction — she’s been unsure whom to contact. She also submitted a request via the Kremlin’s website. No reply came.

“The only contact from the Russian side was one call from social services, asking about me and Margarita,” she says. “I confirmed I was ready to take her immediately. Then silence again.”

Around the same time, investigations by IStories and BBC Panorama were published. In response to allegations of abducting a Ukrainian child, Sergey Mironov posted on X that the allegations were “fake news from Ukrainian intelligence services and their Western handlers,” adding that such “information attacks” were meant to discredit those with an “uncompromising patriotic position,” and that “the truth will prevail.” Novaya Gazeta Europe sent Mironov a list of questions — including why the child’s name was changed and why he would not agree to a DNA test — but received no reply.

Darina also contacted the Netherlands-based Emilia Foundation, which helps return Ukrainian children to their families, as well as the Ukrainian authorities, who have helped publicise her case. The Cyber Police of Ukraine hacked Inna Varlamova’s online messages and sent Darina photographs of Margarita as she now looks. Darina also sought assistance from the United States. On 17 November 2025, she joined other mothers and grandmothers in Paris at a press conference calling for the investigation of abducted Ukrainian children and their return home.

“No gold toilet, no pot of black caviar can replace a sister,” Darina says. “My mother is gone. But I have my children, my aunt and her husband, my brother — that’s what I have left in this world. Russia has taken my business, my homes, and my child. Margarita is part of our family, and by now the Russians know that perfectly well.”

She says that at first she tried to give Mironov and Varlamova the benefit of the doubt — perhaps, she thought, Zavalskaya had misled them and told them Margarita was an orphan.

Now, however, she’s spent years trying to get Margarita back, and there’s no doubt that her captors are aware of her. “And yet they continue to violate every human law and principle, harming above all the girl herself,” she says.

“The truth will come out sooner or later. What will the child be left thinking? 'I was stolen, my fate was decided for me, I had a mother and a biological sister'? I don't think she’ll thank them for it. No university education, no flat in Moscow can give her what we can — a real family — because blood will always win out.”