Russian children’s rights commissioner announces adopted ‘son’ from occupied Ukraine will study to become prosecutor

Pylyp Holovnya, the foster child Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova adopted from the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol when he was 16, has enrolled at a Moscow law university to study to become a prosecutor, she announced. The post was highlighted by the organisation Bring Kids Back UA.

“He's going to be a prosecutor! I'm proud of you, my boy. I know how much effort and work went into this,” Lvova-Belova wrote in a Telegram post.

In Lvova-Belova’s telling, Holovnya lived in a foster family in Mariupol before the war. She claims that after fighting broke out in the city, the family abandoned him and that he later encountered Russian servicemen and asked them to take him to safety. He subsequently met Lvova-Belova, who invited him to live with her family.

In 2022, before the adoption, Holovnya said that he loved Ukraine and didn’t want to live in Russia. In 2023, Lvova-Belova acknowledged that Holovnya sometimes “provoked” her by listening to Ukrainian songs and watching pro-Ukrainian channels. According to her, he did this so that she would send him home and he would “stop hoping that his life could change.”

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Maria Lvova-Belova and Vladimir Putin over the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. According to the Ukrainian project Children of War, Russia has illegally deported at least 20,610 children from Ukraine. Only 2,436 of them have been returned.