It sounds like a movie script: The Ukrainian orphan stolen away by Russian troops and fostered by a woman with close ties to the Kremlin. Miraculously, he got away - 24 hours before being conscripted

His story sounds like a film script: a child who ends up in an orphanage after losing his sickly mother and gangster father when barely out of infancy. The 31 captives were taken to Donetsk – the Ukrainian city controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists since 2014 – where they were given new birth certificates by the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Russian phones. Putin Aide Maria Lvova is pictured in April 2024 ‘She told us exactly who she was and I knew that she was the President’s person, so I had to be careful around her,’ said Bogdan. Lvova-Belova, who meets regularly with Putin as his ‘children’s rights commissioner’, took Bogdan’s friend Filipp into her family as a poster child for their propaganda – despite having five biological children, five adopted children and guardianship over 13 more children with disabilities in care homes. A few weeks later someone posing as Bogdan wrote to Bobrovska – and their discussions rapidly appeared in Russia’s media claiming mendacious Ukrainians were trying to steal children that wanted to stay in Russia.