‘That woman will take them to Moscow’

High-ranking Russian politician Sergey Mironov and his wife adopt child deported from Ukraine

Sergey Mironov, the chairman of the party A Just Russia — For Truth, and his wife, Inna Varlamova, adopted a girl deported from Ukraine’s Kherson region and had her name changed, according to an investigation conducted by independent Russian outlet iStories and the documentary film studio Top Hat/Hayloft Productions. The outlet notes that this is “the first documented case of such a high-ranking Russian politician adopting a Ukrainian child.”

According to iStories, Mironov and Varlamova got married in October 2022, though they never officially announced a wedding. This was Mironov’s fifth marriage, and Varlamova’s fourth. She worked in Russia’s Federation Council for over nine years. Since 2015, she has worked for the State Duma. She has known Mironov since at least the fall of 2019 — that’s when photographs of them together first started appearing.

In late August 2022, Varlamova arrived in Ukraine’s Kherson region with Yana Lantratova, the deputy head of A Just Russia’s faction in the State Duma. They visited the Kherson region’s children’s hospital, where 10-month–old Margarita Prokopenko and two-year old Ilya Vashchenko underwent treatment. According to Natalia Lyutikova, head of the hospital’s pediatric department, Mironov’s wife arrived to the hospital with Tatyana Zavalskaya, who was appointed by the Russian authorities as the head of a local orphanage. After the children were examined, Zavalskaya started calling daily, demanding that the children be discharged, states Lyutikova. She added that Zavalskaya said “that woman [Varlamova] chose them and will take them to Moscow, everything is ready, as well as the tickets.”

The next day after they were discharged, Margarita and Ilya were taken from the orphanage, where they had been until the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to official reports, they were brought to Moscow for examination and rehabilitation. The Ukrainian outlet Hromadske wrote that Zavalskaya took the children from the hospital and accompanied them while they were being transported to annexed Crimea.

A week later, the children appeared in the Moscow region. A department of the Social Development Ministry in the Moscow region sent a request to the Kherson orphanage, asking to send documents that Margarita and Ilya had been left without parental care. In November 2022, the Moscow region’s Podolsk city court considered a civil case, which involved Inna Varlamova and the department of the Social Development Ministry. In Russia, all adoptions must be approved by a court, iStories noted.

In December 2022, one month after the court’s decision, Mironov and Varlamova adopted Margarita, according to documents obtained by iStories. At that point, she was just over a year old. Her name was then legally changed in Russia to Marina Sergeyevna Mironova, according to journalists. A source familiar with the situation told iStories that Margarita’s biological mother had her parental rights taken away and that her father was dead, though she has other relatives. According to iStories, it was known by September 2023 that Ilya was in the Moscow region and had received a new birth certificate.

Maria Chashchilova, a lawyer, noted that adopting children taken from Ukraine to Russia can be considered a violation of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, which is described as “forcible transfer of children from one group to another.” According to Chashchilova, the legal consequences for the adoptive parents are difficult to predict in such a situation, though the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague can issue an arrest warrant.

Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner, has said that Russians cannot adopt children from Ukraine’s occupied territories. Lvova-Belova and Mironov didn’t respond to questions from journalists.

In March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of illegally deporting children from Ukraine’s occupied territories to Russia.

Sergey Mironov called iStories’ report “a fake from the Ukrainian special services and their western handlers.” “I’m already used to information attacks. All of them have one goal — discrediting those who currently hold an irreconcilably patriotic stance. You’re wasting your time. The truth will still win. And Russia will bring the SVO to a complete victory,” he wrote.