KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine — Eighteen-year-old Dasha Smetana lowers her baby sister into a high chair next to the kitchen counter to inspect the photograph of her 7-year-old brother, Stanislav, on the table. He has been missing since Russian authorities took him from a children’s home in southeastern Ukraine during the opening days of the Ukraine war. And, if what Dasha is hearing is true, he could be gone forever.
For the past three years, Viktoriia Novikova, a Ukrainian human rights investigator, has visited Dasha on a quiet street in Kryivyi Rih, Ukraine, some 150 miles from the front line, to give updates on the search for Stanislav.
At the beginning, Novikova had little to share, only the assurance that she was looking for him and 47 other children taken from Kherson Children’s Home in October 2022. Then, a year in, suddenly things looked up. Novikova had been scouring images and videos of children taken from Ukraine, painstakingly going through Russian propaganda videos to identify kids taken from the country, then matching them with information on Russia’s own adoption sites.
