The 28 November screening of the Slidstvo.Info documetary “Children of the State: What Happened to Orphans During Evacuation to Türkiye” was met with disruption attempts, Slidstvo.Info journalist and the film’s co-creator Yanina Korniyenko reported in a Facebook post on 30 November.
Yanina Korniyenko said that a group of persons interfered with the screening of the documentary about the Ruslan Shostak Foundation’s efforts to evacuate orphans to Türkiye in 2022. She added that the day before the screening, she received several messages from girls featured in the film as witnesses, who said say that they were facing pressure by their caretakers and other children, who were outraged by their testimonies to journalists.
According to the journalist, a group of people came to the screening, praising the foundation despite the facts reported in the investigation and disrupting the event.
“On the day of the film’s premiere, we looked at the registered viewers list and saw that a third of them were identical sole proprietors, unemployed persons, StopCorruption journalists, mothers with many children, etc. And the day before, the girls featured our film had received phone calls from other boarding school graduates who warned them that they would come to the screening and say that ‘Shostak and [caretaker] Titov are great,’” Korniyenko said.
Some of the children brought by the caretakers were given popcorn, soda, and black ribbons for a photoshoot at the entrance – a sort of “cosplay” of the film’s promo image. Despite the graphic scene warnings, the teachers insisted on the children being present.
“When I warned the parents that this screening was not for children because there would be violent scenes in the film, they told me, ‘We don’t care. We are here to say that this film was made by some Russians.’ It seemed like they weren’t here out of concern for the children’s wellbeing, but for Shostak’s business,” Korniyenko wrote.
The screening had to be paused twice due to air raid alerts, and the authors of the film (Korniyenko and Anna Babinets) were followed by unknown cameramen and strangers filming them on their phones.
“During the breaks, these people were actively drawing attention to themselves, shouting, saying, ‘We thank Shostak for taking the children away.’ Anna Babinets and I were followed by cameramen (either from Kreativ TV or some other outlet, possibly on the foundation’s invitation), as well as unknown persons who filmed everything on their phones,” said Yanina Korniyenko.
After the screening, the foundation’s management and Shostak’s PR staff tried to take the floor first. Journalist Anna Babinets attempted to moderate the discussion so that other guests could speak as well, but it was difficult to constrain the discussion.
“But it was difficult to keep ‘the project’s loyal participants’ at bay. All the guests invited by Shostak repeated the same narrative: that ‘things are not so clear-cut’, and closing with the words, ‘Thank you Ruslan Shostak that the children could eat some fruit and see the sea.’ This makes me want to say just one thing: what an embarrassment. Instead of admitting their mistakes and putting effort into addressing them, the foundation probably continues to follow their plan as written. They keep talking about how well they organised everything and how they set up multiple safety boundaries (which adult Turkish men very easily bypassed and entered the children’s rooms),” the journalist noted.
In early 2022, the Ruslan Shostak Foundation undertook to evacuate a group of orphans from Dnipropetrovsk oblast to Türkiye. The children were housed in Turkish hotels. According to the journalists, when a monitoring group of 11 Ukrainian officials arrived there, they found that the children were being beaten, starved, forcibly featured in promo videos for the foundation, and two girls returned from the evacuation pregnant by adult Turkish men working at the hotel.
“We released this investigation, having analysed all the responsible parties: from the foundation and the caretakers to employees of social services and ministries. Using this evacuation effort as an example, we wanted to showcase the weakness of the system, where no one is willing to take responsibility and there is no one to stand up for the abused children. The questions to Shostak take up no more than 30% of the entire film, and the responsibility is divided clearly between the foundation, the state services, and the caretakers. But the foudnation’s response made it seem like 100% of the blame was on them,” Yanina said.
Slidstvo.Info executive director Anna Babinets noted in a Facebook post that the information reported in the film was damning for Shostak’s business and his reputation.
“Which is why his PR staff had to launch an appalling PR machine involving orphans and their adoptive mothers who don’t give a damn about these ‘state-owned’ children. Neither does the whole foundation, at the end of the day. Because when you are certain that you are in the right, you don’t involve ‘controlled influencers,’ ‘loyal project participants’ and media on your payroll. All these measures were lsited in the action plan accidentally sent to Slidstvo.Info by Shostak’s PR staff. And during our premiere, as Yanina Korniyenko said, they were clearly following it,” Anna Babinets added.
She also said that a woman came to the film’s premiere with her ten adopted children and said, “Thank you Ruslan Shostak that our children could eat fruit and vegetables every day in Türkiye.”
“This woman is one of many in Ukraine who exploits other people’s children for their own benefit, neglecting the interests of those who were abandoned by their parents. Just like businessman Ruslan Shostak, who was featured in our investigation as well. In 2022, he took hundreds of orphans from Dnipropetrovsk orphans to Türkiye, where he arranged hotels for them, and the foundation named after him kept filming videos with the children for the businessman’s PR (the children did not want to participate, but were forced to). In the end, as the inspection revealed, the children in the evacuation were beaten, bullied, and two of the boarding school students became pregnant by Turkish men,” wrote Babinets.
Anna said that, as the moderator of the post-screening discussion, she deliberately offered the floor to this mother of 10 children.
“So that everyone can see the level of cynicism to which people stoop, building their image on disadvantaged children and forgetting about the responsibility they bear,” the journalist explained.
In a comment to Institute of Mass Information journalist Valentyna Troyan, Yanina Korniyenko said that the team knew of two media outlets that, in their opinion, may have been commissioned (or simply not very balanced in their coverage). These were Delo and Telegraf.
“For now, we are waiting for the rest. Many people on their side filmed everything, so we expect more materials,” Yanina wrote.
Previously
Slidstvo.Info reported on 19 November that the charity foundation by Ukrainian businessman Ruslan Shostak was preparing a media campaign to mitigate the backlash that was to follow the release of Slidstvo.Info’s investigation into their work.
According to Slidstvo.Info, a foundation employee emailed a file titled “War-Free Childhood: Action Plan” to their journalist, likely on accident. The document listed PR steps that suggest the foundation is preparing a campaign to neutralise the fallout from the media outlet’s investigation which is set to be released shortly. In particular, the foundation plans to involve bot farms, controlled bloggers, and meet with editors of top news outlets and publish their own materials there.
The journalist received the document while working on an investigation into the evacuation of 3,500 Ukrainian children from Dnipropetrovsk oblast to Türkiye by the Ruslan Shostak Foundation as part of the project “War-Free Childhood”. During a monitoring visit to hotels where children were staying, the Commissioner’s Office recorded gross violations of children’s rights, including psychological and physical abuse. Two underage girls returned from Türkiye pregnant.
The Shostak Foundation admitted they had developed an “anti-crisis action plan” to counteract the impact of the Slidstvo.Info investigation into the children’s rights violations committed during the evacuation of Ukrainian orpahns to Türkiye.