Fleeing Russian Bombs, Ukrainian Orphans Faced Abuse and Neglect in Turkish Hotels

For the Ukrainian children huddled in the basement of the Horlytsia orphanage as Russian bombs exploded around them in February 2022, evacuation sounded like a dream come true.

They weren’t given details, but they overheard their teachers mentioning the Turkish coast. Freezing cold and terrified, they were thrilled at the prospect of an escape to the beach.

“We were so happy,” recalled one teenage resident of the orphanage in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. “Finally, we would get to see the sea.”

But Turkey wasn’t the seaside idyll they were dreaming of. When they arrived at their hotel in the southern province of Antalya, another girl recalled, one of their first tasks was to clean the beach of seaweed, and their bathrooms of mold. (This account is based on lengthy interviews with seven evacuated children, as well as a confidential Ukrainian monitoring report obtained by Slidstvo and OCCRP.)

Although the food was good at first, conditions later deteriorated. Meals became spotty, and the children sometimes found hairs and insects in their food. Rooms were overcrowded and moldy. They were told they had to sing and dance for cameras, with the resulting videos used to solicit donations to pay for their accommodations, and they could be punished or shamed if they refused to participate.

“When we didn’t want to sing as a group, they told us they’d take away our phones,” one girl said.

“‘They feed you, pay for everything, they take you everywhere,’” another girl recalled being told. “‘And you don’t want to be filmed?’”

The orphans didn’t know it at the time, but their hasty evacuation had been organized not by the Ukrainian government, but by a local multi-millionaire businessman.

In the desperate first days of the war, the businessman, Ruslan Shostak, had been approached by the local government for help funding the orphans’ evacuation. In response, he quickly established a charity, the Ruslan Shostak Charitable Foundation, whose activities were widely covered in the media and garnered support from Ukrainian celebrities. The mass evacuation of 3,500 children and their caretakers from over a dozen orphanages and small care homes in Dnipropetrovsk, a frontline region in southeastern Ukraine, was promoted under the tagline “Childhood Without War.”

But to keep the support going, the children say they were told, they had to perform. Meanwhile, the newly formed foundation struggled to manage the logistics of keeping hundreds of traumatized children — many with serious medical and psychological problems — safe in several hotels it had rented out on the Turkish coast. The arrangement had removed the children from the immediate danger of war — but also taken them thousands of kilometers from the government bodies responsible for their safety and education.

A team led by the office of Ukraine’s Ombudsman finally inspected one of the hotels in March 2024 and produced a scathing report on conditions there, finding that the several hundred children there at the time had been systematically subjected to physical violence, received inadequate medical care, and only sporadically attended online classes. The report also noted that children had been pressured by their caretakers not to speak candidly to the inspection team about their conditions.

At the end of 2024, the children were returned to Ukraine. Two of them, by that point, had already been sent home after becoming pregnant with the babies of Turkish men who had had access to the facility. Although both girls were under the Turkish age of consent at the time, the Foundation did not report their pregnancies to Turkish authorities.

In a two-hour interview with Slidstvo, Shostak defended his work with the children as important and necessary in the face of encroaching war. He said he and his team had done the best possible job under difficult circumstances, laying responsibility for any problems on the children’s caretakers and the orphanage staff who had accompanied them from Ukraine.

Although Shostak conceded that he had not read the Ombudsman’s report on conditions at the Larissa Hotel, he said its conclusions were faulty.

“We built security systems, we built four borders…to protect the children,” he said. “From the educators, from the children themselves, from other children, from outsiders. … But, apparently, when there are a lot of children together, things can happen.”

The report was never released publicly, and the poor conditions the Ukrainian children endured in Turkey never became widely known. And although it included a wide range of recommendations, including relocating the children to better facilities and conducting official investigations, it is not clear if any of these measures were implemented. Representatives of multiple Ukrainian government bodies responsible for child welfare did not respond to reporters’ requests for comment.

Concerned that the report had been ignored, a whistleblower shared a copy with journalists from OCCRP’s Czech partner, Investigace.cz. (Slidstvo later obtained the same report from a different source who was part of the monitoring group. The Ombudsman’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the report)

The report concluded that conditions at the site the group visited — the Larissa Hotel in the seaside town of Beldibi — were very poor, with unsanitary conditions, dirty blankets, lack of free access to drinking water and toilets, and multiple children forced to share beds in crowded rooms. The children’s schooling was spotty, frequently interrupted by poor internet access and the fact that their tablet computers, which they used to connect to remote lessons in Ukraine, were confiscated as a punishment when they refused to comply with the foundation’s demands to participate in fundraising videos.

One 13-year-old boy fell from a third-floor balcony after he and other children had been climbing on air conditioners unsupervised. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent two weeks at a hospital, but no report was ever filed on the incident. Another boy didn’t receive medical attention for a cataract, and his vision deteriorated, while a girl with the eye condition strabismus said she had repeatedly asked for treatment and been ignored.

Poor security measures led to a number of alarming incidents, with children escaping the facility to drink alcohol, use drugs, and even commit petty crimes. In one case, the report said, a girl escaped and had “sexual contact with a Russian citizen,” who then entered the Larissa premises with a gun to look for her. In another case, a girl went missing for two days and was located on the beach after a search-and-rescue operation involving a helicopter.

None of these incidents were properly reported to Turkish authorities, the report said.

The Turkish government did not respond to requests for comment, but issued a brief statement on December 1 confirming that it had not been informed of the Ukrainian girls’ pregnancies, or received any “formal report or complaint.” When Turkey’s Ministry of Family and Social Services later became aware of the allegations, it “filed a criminal complaint and initiated legal proceedings,” the statement said, although it did not specify the target of the complaint or its outcome.

Shostak told journalists that much of the trouble in the Turkish hotels stemmed from the fact that he was dealing with an especially troubled population of children.

“You just don’t understand how orphans live in Ukraine, the colossally trashy conditions they’re in. It’s just that [in Turkey] it was all concentrated in one place. That’s why we have problems and we have some cases — not very good ones. But I definitely don’t feel responsible. I feel responsible that the children lived in the sun for three years and ate fruits and vegetables from the Turkish coast. They swam in the Mediterranean Sea for eight months a year.”

Kyrylo Nevdokha, a Ukrainian advocate for the rights of institutionalized children, said that those who organized the evacuation may have tried their best, but “good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes.”

“The government, the system of protecting children, did not fully do its job,” he added. “This should have been planned in advance, how the evacuation would be carried out, where it would be carried out. Much earlier. Let’s be honest, there were signals that a full-scale invasion was possible.”

Shostak dismissed allegations of substandard medical care as “complete trash.” He and his team promised to send journalists materials that would support his account, including a second monitoring report showing that conditions at the hotel improved later in 2024. Instead, a representative of the Ruslan Shostak Foundation — apparently by accident — emailed Slidstvo a message containing a plan for a public relations campaign to “neutralize” the Slidstvo report

Journalists managed to obtain a copy of the second report on their own, from another source. While it noted that food at the hotel had improved by July 2024 and children now had access to fresh drinking water, it also said many of the same problems persisted, including lack of access to medical and psychological care. It even logged several additional incidents of alleged abuse.

A Song and Dance

The mass evacuation of Ukrainian children from Dnipropetrovsk has been widely promoted by the Ruslan Shostak Foundation, and Shostak himself, as the “largest project in the world to evacuate children after the Second World War.”

Shostak was a retail multi-millionaire when the war broke out, but had never run a charity before, or worked with children. Still, he says he was fired up by the injustice of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and ready to do what he could to help the war effort.

“It was a cry from the soul of our authorities there, if I may say so. Because the tanks were already standing near Kryvyi Rih. The tanks were near Kharkiv. … It was scary, but what should we do?” he asked. “Give them to Putin?”

In an interview with Slidstvo, he said he jumped into action, negotiating a deal with the government of Turkey to bring the children there.

He emphasized the difficulty of the operation, describing how he managed to get the children from Dnipropetrovsk to Romania, from where they flew to Turkey in nine passenger jets he chartered. From there, they proceeded to the Mediterranean coast by train.

“You had 2,000 people on board,” he recalled. “Of them, 1,000-plus are children. Something is always happening to them. Do you understand what it means, 1,000 children?”

At first, he said, the evacuation was funded entirely out of his own pocket. But after realizing that the war would last longer than a few months, he realized it would cost “tens of millions” to keep the children in Turkey. He set up the Ruslan Shostak Charitable Foundation and started raising money “from caring people and companies” to pay for the children’s continued stay. (In the end, Shostak said, the evacuation cost $10 million, of which 60 percent was funded by him personally.)

But the monitoring report tells a different story. When the children initially arrived in Turkey, it said, they were under the protection of the Turkish Ministry of Family, who provided them with social services, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Foundation’s main role, initially, was organizing and funding the hotel stay, according to the report.

But at some point, this division of labor broke down, and the Foundation began taking on a bigger role — and restricting access to the children, making it “impossible or difficult to implement the programs” of the Red Cross and Turkish Ministry, the report found.

“The foundation’s representatives and the children’s accompanying persons stopped providing the necessary information, restricted psychologists’ and social workers’ access to minors, and stopped taking them for medical examinations, almost completely restricting any medical assistance to the children.”

The report said the Foundation claimed it did not need external support due to its fundraising activities, which involved using the children in photo shoots and video recordings, as well as public events.

Those who cooperated by agreeing to be filmed, or learning songs and dances for the Foundation’s benefit concerts, were rewarded with extra food and other provisions, the report said. Those who refused were punished. The report also said that Oleksandr Titov, a senior teacher at the orphanage and the main staffer responsible for its children in Turkey, had received special treatment — including extra food and supplies — for cooperating with the Foundation on fundraising. (In an interview with Slidstvo, he said that he “had nothing to do with the foundation” and had received no preferential treatment.)

All seven children interviewed by Slidstvo recalled regularly performing songs and dances, and five out of seven said either they or others had been forced to participate. Many did not clearly understand the intended audience, though some said the performances were for “visiting officials,” “guests,” or “volunteers.”

“Very often they organized some kind of celebrations,” said Vika, one of the students. “They forced us to sing songs as a group, or to dance. Sometimes when we didn’t want to sing, they told us that they would take away our phones, tablets, and other things.”

Several children recounted having their phones or the tablet computers they used for remote schooling confiscated. One girl said she was shown videos of Russian drones attacking Ukraine to reinforce the point that she and the others should be grateful for having been taken to Turkey.

Another girl, who asked that her identity not be revealed, said the children were frequently filmed while eating, or asked to speak a few lines for the camera. If they resisted, they were told: “‘No, you have to, you’re in the project. They’re spending money on you, clothing you, giving you shoes, feeding you, and you’re behaving like this!’” she said.

Several girls mentioned seeing themselves appear in the foundation’s promotional materials on Tik-Tok or Instagram. “Everything’s there,” said a girl named Katya. “Photos, videos, everything that happened in Turkey. I’m there too, though not too often, thank God.

Shostak said the idea that any children had been forced to perform for money was “complete nonsense,” explaining that they performed at monthly “birthday” celebrations organized by the foundation. An assistant added that the children participated in patriotic events organized by the local Ukrainian community and that they staged “the best Ukrainian flash mobs in Turkey.”

In an interview with reporters, Titov, the senior teacher, expressed shock at the suggestion that the children had been pressured to perform or punished. He said most did not have their own phones, but used tablet computers provided by the Foundation.

But Nevdokha, the children’s rights advocate, said that forcing them to participate in public fundraising was “a violation of the child’s right to choose, their right to dignity.”

The Shostak Foundation should, at minimum, have blurred the faces of the children whose stories and appeals they posted online, said Nevdokha, who spent much of his childhood in Ukrainian residential facilities himself.

“Even in the context of this foundation — you have a business, you have profits, and I understand that you have invested a lot of your own money. But using children for such large-scale PR fundraising, you have to weigh things up.”

“I’ve Seen It All”

For the children in the orphanages of Dnipropetrovsk region, the start of full-scale war in Ukraine was just the latest in a long list of privations and traumas they had experienced in their short lives.

Nastya, who was 13 years old when the war started, did several stints in orphanages as a young child because her mother and father did not have the resources to care for her. She then ended up with a foster family where the mother physically abused her, before finally being placed in a facility in the city of Kryvyi Rih.

Ilona, a spirited 15-year-old at the beginning of the war, had ended up in an institution in the city of Dnipro as a second-grader after her alcoholic father burned their house down by leaving a mattress too close to the stove. Her mother sometimes took Ilona and her siblings out of the orphanage on weekends, but during these outings they often witnessed their father beating their mother or hurling furniture at her.

“I’ve gotten used to this in my life, I’ve seen it all,” Ilona said in an interview with Slidstvo.

When Ilona, Nastya, and their classmates arrived at their hotel in Turkey, they relished the environment of relative freedom, but struggled to adjust to the food, which many described as consisting largely of bulgur wheat. Some said they were also given new duties, including caring for disabled classmates and cleaning their urine and feces.

So when a 20-year-old worker in the hotel’s restaurant, Salih, began sneaking food to Ilona — a loaf of bread, a bit of sausage — she was delighted at the special treatment.

“So he would feed me,” she recalled. “And we met, and then he asked for my Instagram.” They began going for walks together — often alongside an orphanage staffer, whom Ilona claims facilitated the budding relationship.

“She let me go and picked me up, and we went for walks, to eat ice cream and burgers, she took me to the beach during [the younger children’s naptime], where Salih and I went for walks.

Ilona wasn’t the only orphanage resident being pursued. Several of the girls interviewed said it was an open secret that several of the Ukrainian girls were seeing Turkish men. Katya, who was 13 or 14 at the time, said they were frequently made uncomfortable by the way the male hotel staffers looked at them.

“They looked at beautiful girls, well … very well, so to speak. I didn’t like it.”

Katya said that in practice, there were no rules governing whether male hotel workers could be alone with the children — at one point, she said, the shower in her room broke and she was left with the repairman on her own. (Titov, the senior teacher, said that the Turkish hotel staffers were not supposed to be in the children’ s living area, although he conceded that it was difficult to control who went where in the hotel.)

Nastya, although she was only 15, began dating a cook in the hotel restaurant named Mami, 23, who had asked a boy from the orphanage to introduce them.

“At first I didn’t want to meet him,” Nastya said. “I said, ‘No.’ Then I came to meet him, I don’t know why myself. It was my subconscious.”

Nastya said her relationship with Mami was an open secret with both teachers and students at the orphanage, and that she was allowed to go on walks with him, although when it came to physical intimacy they were more secretive.

“He would climb over the hotel fence and come to my room,” she explained. “They saw him once, and then they called the police and issued a fine — because there are refugees from Ukraine here and why is someone climbing over the fence? — but he still kept climbing over.”

Both Katya and Nastya, then still underage, became pregnant as a result of their relationships with the Turkish men.

Slidstvo managed to track down Salih, the Turkish cook who impregnated Ilona. He defended his conduct, saying that several Ukrainian girls in the orphanage had Turkish “boyfriends.”

“Why [are you talking to] me? Why not them, why me?” he asked. He explained that it had been relatively easy to find moments to sneak away with Ilona into a disabled toilet, where they had sexual encounters, and that one Ukrainian teacher had taken pity on the young couple and helped facilitate their meetings. Ilona’s pregnancy, Salih claimed, was intentional, after they had discussed how much they would like to have a baby.

But Ilona recalls being shocked when she realized she was pregnant “It was very unexpected,” she said. “I was hysterical.”

Nastya, too, told journalists she had never imagined getting pregnant. “I didn’t even think about a child. I’m a child myself,” she said.

She spent months hiding her pregnancy, wearing baggy shirts and eating meals privately so her nausea wouldn’t be detected, because she was terrified of being punished or forced to have an abortion.

At one point, she said, Titov, the senior teacher from her orphanage, caught wind of her situation. In a phone call from Ukraine, she said, he pressed her to take an abortifacient pill to “avoid problems.” Terrified of losing the ability to have children in the future, she denied everything and even had a friend help her fake a negative pregnancy test. (Titov firmly denied this story, saying he had not even known about Nastya’s pregnancy at the time and that he would never pressure anyone to have an abortion. “It’s a sin,” he said.)

In Nastya’s telling, only one member of the staff — a teacher who noticed her growing belly — ever discovered she was pregnant while she was still in Turkey. But that teacher promised not to tell anyone, and Nastya never received any prenatal care in the country. Having completed the 9th grade, she returned to Ukraine in her 7th month of pregnancy. Ilona, who was also pregnant in the autumn of 2023, also returned to her home country. Both girls found their own living arrangements, without any further involvement from the Foundation, as they awaited the births of their children.

Although Ilona had believed that she and Salih were in love, she said he turned aggressive towards her, becoming jealous when she went to a playground with some friends without asking permission and physically grabbing her when he heard she was leaving Turkey.

“He became angry. He started grabbing my arms and throat,” she said. “The educator pulled him away.”

Both Nastia and Ilona gave birth to their children on their own, without the support of their former educators and little assistance from Ukrainian social services.

Svitlana Lebid, headmistress of the Horlytsia orphanage, where Ilona studied, does not believe that any of her staff members acted inappropriately. Instead, she blames Ilona.

“There were no instances when [my educators] violated or failed to fulfil their obligations,” Lebid says. “The circumstances are not up to us. … This girl came from an antisocial family. … How else can it be, when this way of life is ingrained in every cell, in the blood of these children.”

But the Ukrainian monitoring report said the pregnancies, along with other incidents involving children having contact with unauthorized adults, could be attributed to poor security and a lack of supervision.

“The Foundation’s lack of criteria for selecting staff and controlling their stay and movement in the hotel has led to a number of significant violations of children’s rights,” the report said. “[Hotel] staff are in daily contact with the children and have round-the-clock unhindered access to their places of study and residence. This makes it possible, among other things, for sexual crimes against children and violence against them to be committed.”

The End of ‘Childhood Without War’

Аbout nine months after the monitoring visit that revealed the systematic violations at the Larissa Hotel, the “Childhood Without War” project was wound down.

All the children still in Turkey were returned to Ukraine. Younger ones were returned to their families or placed in family-based care, while older ones were placed in vocational training centers or other educational facilities.

Shostak said the project was never meant to be a long-term solution, and that the return of the children to Ukraine had nothing to do with the violations identified in the report.

“Children cannot stay in hotel conditions all the time,” he said. “This is indeed an issue and needs to be solved differently. The state must get involved in this.”

“Secondly, well, it’s my money, and the state didn’t help us with a single penny. And it wasn’t planning to help.”

Officials at the Ombudsman’s office and multiple Ukrainian social protection bodies did not provide comments about what happened in the aftermath of the monitoring visit. In a brief conversation with a reporter, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk service for children’s affairs said her office had contacted law enforcement, who had conducted a “lengthy” investigation. “Everyone who was guilty was punished, by losing their jobs and so on,” she said.

In response to requests for information from Slidstvo and a member of parliament, Ukrainian police and prosecutors said that an investigation had been opened on the basis of the Ombudsman’s report, but that it had been closed because the findings did not legally amount to a crime. An appeal was rejected.

But Nastya told Slidstvo that she was pressured not to tell her full story to criminal investigators.

Nastya said Titov, the orphanage head, had asked her to sign a document saying that Mami had not raped her.

“He says, if you want me to have no problems, and you, and Mami, sign the paper [saying] that there was no violence.”

“I signed it,” she said. “I wrote, ‘It was with my consent.’”

Titov denied pressuring Nastya to sign anything: “I didn’t contact anyone and didn’t say anything,” he said. “I didn’t ask, I didn’t inquire.” While acknowledging that an underage girl cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse with an adult, he kept insisting that the relationship was genuine.

“She herself specifically said that she loves him,” Titov said.

Ilona recalled being interviewed by police while she was breastfeeding her son Mykyta, in the company of staff from the Ministry of Social Policy. She recalls being asked when and how she met Salih, and a few details about her baby, including his height and weight. The interview, she said, lasted 15 minutes.

Although the “Childhood Without War” program is over, the Ruslan Shostak Foundation is still operating, running programs to provide dental care for orphans and cars for foster families. Titov, the orphanage head, said that he had suffered unfair career consequences after the report, being demoted from a supervisory role to a job as a physical education teacher, even though he had not been found liable in the criminal investigation.

“For me, it’s a blow,” he said.

A 2023 video featuring Nastya is still visible on the charity’s promotional Instagram account. She thanks the foundation and talks about her dream of becoming a massage therapist and opening her own candy shop.

In reality, today Nastya is struggling. Mami flew to Ukraine to live with her, but their relationship fell apart and he began to beat her, she said. She gave her daughter the Turkish name “Melek,” which means “angel,” but the child was removed from her custody by the owner of a private shelter where she briefly stayed. In Nastya’s telling, she had been manipulated into signing away her parental rights, which she is now fighting to regain.

Now, instead of dreaming of a career and a small business, she just wishes for her baby back, and a place for them to live together.

“[I want] Melek, ideally,” she said. “An apartment, then Melek. Then maybe if it works out for me, I’ll find a husband, get some kind of job, and that’s it. That’s all I need: I take Melek to kindergarten and go to work, then we come home together, we lie down and watch a movie.”

Burcu Karakas (Turkey) and iFact (Georgia) contributed reporting.