Police in Syktyvkar have sought to remove three schoolchildren from their families after the children climbed on a Victory Day installation. The mothers of two of the three children, Anna Savelyeva and Irina Kalibabchuk, described the situation in VK posts on May 29.

Savelyeva said the local Internal Affairs Ministry’s juvenile affairs unit had filed a petition to remove her child from the family. In a video shared by Kalibabchuk, she displayed a document she described as a petition to place her child in a temporary detention center for juvenile offenders.

According to the parents and police, on April 18, three children born in 2017 climbed on a structure outside the city pool that had been erected in celebration of Victory Day on May 9. A photograph Savelyeva published shows a structure of square and rectangular panels featuring photographs of World War II veterans, images of the St. George ribbon, and Victory Day inscriptions. The parents referred to the structure as “blocks.”

The three children identified by police as offenders had been playing tag or hide-and-seek on the structure along with other schoolchildren, Kalibabchuk said. A broken block was found on the structure afterward, Savelyeva said. The children deny having broken it, saying everything was already that way when they arrived. All three were placed on a “preventive monitoring list,” and the juvenile affairs unit asked a court to remove them from their families.

Savelyeva said her son is now afraid he will be sent to jail:

“Mom, am I going to jail?” my eight-year-old son whispered, staring at the floor. I had to explain to an eight-year-old boy what “preventive monitoring” means. He didn’t understand. And then he cried and said, “But I wasn’t lying — I said it was already like that.”

Komi children’s rights commissioner, Tatyana Kozlova, said on May 30 that reports of children being removed from their families were premature. “The decision to place them in a temporary detention center [would be] made exclusively by a court,” she said. “As of today, no such decision has been made.”

The Internal Affairs Ministry’s directorate for Komi said on May 31 that the reports were inaccurate: police submitted materials to a court seeking to send one of the children to a juvenile detention center, but no removal took place.

Police say the child had previously stolen others’ belongings and money and committed other “socially dangerous acts.” The same child allegedly “committed an act of vandalism” at one of the city’s World War II memorials, according to the juvenile affairs commission.

The case will be reviewed at a June 2 meeting of the city’s juvenile affairs commission, where preventive measures will be determined, Kozlova said.

Meduza