Seven minors repatriated from Russia

Seven Moldovan children who remained in Russia without parental care were repatriated on September 22. The repatriation mission was organized by the Ministry of Social Protection, Family and Child in cooperation with Moldova's Embassy in Russia and the Representative Office of the Swiss Foundation Terre des Hommes in Chisinau, with the assistance of the Ministry of Heath and the Foreign Ministry, Info-Prim Neo reports, quoting sources in the Ministry. The children are aged between 3 and 14 and are from Orhei, Drochia and Criuleni districts and from the Transnistrian region. They include two brothers aged 11 and 14, a sister and a brother aged 11 and 10, a brother and a sister aged 4 and 5 and a three-year-old girl. Four of them will be reintegrated into the biological or extended families. The others have been taken to temporary placement centers and will live there until the tutelage authorities decide on the best protection form for them. The two brothers aged 11 and 14 went to Russia together with their mother who is a Russian citizen nine years ago. The woman was deprived of parental rights as she abused alcohol. The children were placed in a residential institution. The woman's relatives refused to raise the boys. Their father, who is Moldovan, accepted them into his new family. The brother and sister aged 11 and 10 left for Russia together with their mother and her Russian husband in 2008. Later, the woman gave birth to a child and left it and the elder boys in the care of her husband, returning to Moldova. The step father institutionalized the brothers. The woman now is in Moldova. She lives an amoral life and does not want to look after her children. The brother and sister aged 4 and 5 were taken to Russia by their mother, who later abandoned them on the street. Her whereabouts are not known. The children will live with their grandmother. The three-year-old girl was abandoned by her mother, who is single. The woman was later deprived of parental rights. This year, the Ministry has organized 10 missions to repatriate 22 children. Seven of them were brought home from Ukraine, 13 from Russia, one from Sweden and one from Romania.