Hanna Zamyshliaieva has lived for four years between two fears. The first is that her son, Anton Volkovych, who needs constant medical supervision, may still be alive somewhere without care, medication or familiar people. The second is that he may already be dead, and she still does not know the truth.
Anton is 24. Before the full-scale invasion, he lived in a specialized residential care institution in Oleshky, in the Kherson region. After Russian forces entered the area, contact with him was lost. His mother does not know where he is, what condition he is in, whether he receives treatment or whether he is alive at all.
In Kyiv, Hanna appeared before journalists with two other women — Oksana Oliinyk and Larysa Branytska. All three are searching for relatives who lived in the same institution. They do not speak in the language of high politics, but in the language of families whose most vulnerable loved ones were taken from them.
According to Daycom’s assessment, this story exposes one of the least visible wounds of the war: the fate of people with disabilities who lived in institutions, depended on care and, after occupation, effectively disappeared from the view of their families, the Ukrainian state and international humanitarian structures.
When Ukrainians speak about deportations to Russia or occupied territories, they most often speak about children. That is indeed one of the most painful crimes of this war. But alongside them is another group: people who are formally adults, yet because of their health cannot protect themselves, leave, make a phone call or explain what happened to them.
The residents of the Oleshky institution belonged to that category. Many used wheelchairs, required medication, regular medical examinations and help with daily life. For them, being moved without relatives and without transparent documentation is not simply a change of address. It is a threat to life.
Anton underwent several operations after birth. He needs neurological consultations and careful regulation of medication. His mother is asking for any news, even unofficially. She is ready to receive a message in any form, if only it tells her where her son is.
Larysa Branytska is searching for her granddaughter Maryna. She is 22, was born prematurely, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. Before the war, her grandmother visited her regularly in Oleshky. Maryna smiled, clapped her hands, had friends and lived in a familiar environment.
After the occupation, the road to the institution vanished. With it vanished the feeling that her child, even an adult by passport, was safe. Larysa rejects Russia’s language of “rescuing” such people from the war zone. To her, this was not rescue. It was removal without family consent and without the right to know what happened afterward.
Oksana Oliinyk is searching for her daughter Anna. She is 26 and also uses a wheelchair. At the beginning of the invasion, her mother could still speak to her by phone. Then Anna lost the phone, and contact depended on other residents. Later, those people were moved to another institution, and the last thread broke.
For the families, the worst part is not only the absence of contact. It is not knowing who is now responsible for their loved ones. Is there a doctor nearby? Were medical records preserved? Is there enough care? Does the staff understand the diagnoses? Were disabled residents treated as a nameless group that could be moved without explanation?
There were 101 people in the Oleshky institution. At the beginning of the war, only 13 were taken home by their parents. Four died in the first two months. The others were moved between institutions that came under Russian control. Some have been traced, but far from all.
The three people whose relatives spoke in Kyiv were first transferred to another residential institution. A year later, they were moved again — this time to the Henichesk district, in the occupied part of southern Ukraine. Several other residents were taken to Penza in Russia. The rest are believed to remain in institutions in occupied territory.
This geography matters. It shows how quickly institutionalized people can lose visibility in war. They are not always recorded as prisoners. They are not soldiers. Often, they cannot speak for themselves. They may have no phone, documents, lawyer or relative capable of searching for them for years.
That is why their fate so easily falls out of the political agenda. Diplomacy speaks of cease-fires, sanctions, missiles, territory and prisoner exchanges. Somewhere in that shadow remain adults with disabilities whom their relatives still call children, because their lives have always depended on someone else’s care.
Ukraine has identified tens of thousands of children forcibly transferred or deported after Russia’s invasion. Some of those cases became the basis for international criminal proceedings against Russia’s leadership. But the story of the institutions shows that vulnerability is broader than age.
A person can be legally adult and still completely dependent on care. They may not fit the familiar political language of “children,” but they need no less protection. This is one of the moral traps of war: legal categories often fail to keep pace with the reality of human helplessness.
Russia tries to describe such movements as evacuation or rescue. But real evacuation requires transparency, records, contact with relatives, access for international organizations, medical continuity and the possibility of return. Without that, “rescue” becomes removal into the unknown.
The largest problem today is not even that some people are hard to find. Some have been located. The problem is that there is no reliable international mechanism that can return them to Ukraine quickly, safely and with respect for their medical needs.
For people with severe disabilities, return cannot look like ordinary evacuation. It requires specialized transport, doctors, documents, consent from legal representatives, coordination between sides and medical monitoring. It requires a humanitarian corridor not as a political gesture, but as a professional operation.
International organizations with experience working with civilians in war zones still have not received full access to the former residents of the Oleshky institution. That creates a dangerous vacuum: families have no information, Ukraine has no control, and Russia effectively decides alone who is held where and under what conditions.
For mothers and grandmothers, this is not an abstract issue. They are not asking for complicated political formulas. They want to see their children, hear a voice, receive medical information, bring them home or at least know that they are alive and receiving care.
In stories like these, war appears not as an explosion, but as silence. No call. No document. No answer to a request. No person in the familiar bed of an institution where they lived for years. There is only a photograph, a name, a diagnosis and a relative who cannot stop searching.
Hanna Zamyshliaieva says she is fighting for the return of her child. The word is not a mistake, even though her son is 24. For a mother who spent years living alongside her son’s illness, his adult age does not cancel her responsibility or love. The war took not only contact from her. It took away the right to care.
That is one of the cruelest forms of violence: to deprive a person not only of a loved one, but of knowledge about them. Such uncertainty exhausts slowly. It has no end date, does not allow grief, does not allow hope to settle. It holds a family in permanent waiting.
Ukraine will still have to build a full accounting of those taken from institutions, hospitals, children’s homes and specialized care facilities. It will be a difficult process of documents, testimonies, databases, occupation archives, international pressure and the return of each individual person.
But it does not begin with tables. It begins with the voices of mothers and grandmothers who come forward with photographs and names. Anton, Maryna, Anna — they are not statistical units and not “evacuated persons” in someone else’s administrative language. They are people being waited for.
Until a trusted humanitarian channel is created for them, this part of the war will remain an open wound. Returning territories and returning people are different tasks, but they cannot be separated. A state can restore its borders, but its moral wholeness also depends on whether it finds those who could not ask for help themselves.
