“Let him fight, and the children to an orphanage”: enlistment officers at a checkpoint mobilized a single father

Employees of a Territorial Recruitment Center (TCC) at a checkpoint mobilized a single father, leaving his two seven-year-old twins on the side of the road.

This was reported by Suspilne Zaporizhzhia.

Twenty-eight-year-old Volodymyr Strakhov’s wife left the family when the children were two years old, and since then the man has been raising them on his own.

Last year, together with his son and daughter, he lived for some time in the Pology district of Zaporizhzhia region, which was occupied by the Russian Federation. Later, he left abroad via Russia, and eventually returned to Ukraine.

“He was traveling here with the children, it took them a day and a half to get there. And he simply didn’t make it — they were taken off the bus with the children at the checkpoint. And the children were just dropped off on the street. He managed to call me — it was at 11 p.m. — they took him away, and I picked up the children,” said the mobilized man’s sister, Oksana.

She claims he did not have time to apply for a deferment as a single father, because he was immediately detained at the TCC.

“At first, they said: ‘We’ll check your documents and let you go in the morning.’ And that’s it, nobody let him go again. He didn’t get in touch for three days,” the sister added.

She says she asked TCC employees by phone to issue a summons for a specific date so her brother could apply for a deferment.

“No, let him fight somewhere. And the children — two weeks in the hospital, and then into an orphanage,” she quoted one of the TCC employees as replying.

Now Volodymyr is already undergoing basic military training, and Oksana has been granted temporary guardianship over the children.

Earlier, in Vinnytsia region, police together with TCC employees chased a car carrying children — two little girls — which had failed to stop at their order near the village of Kashperivka.