The wife of the Russian Emergencies Ministry head is involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children

Elena Milskaya runs the organisation National Monitoring Centre for Missing and Affected Children, whose volunteers meet deported children in the temporarily occupied Crimea, according to an investigation by the Russian media outlet Project.

Officially, the Centre and the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations signed a document on cooperation. In 2022, volunteers of the Centre greeted trains with abducted children from Kherson in the temporarily occupied Canköy in Qırım.

Milskaya's Centre may also have been involved in the abduction of children from the Romashka refugee camp in the Rostov region. In one of the photo reports posted by the woman, journalists recognised children from Donetsk pre-school orphanage No. 1.

"There is a girl named Diana among the children. Now she, along with her two sisters and brother, has been taken 1,500 kilometres away, to the Bashkir town of Uchaly," the investigators say.

Milskaya and her husband, who was Putin's bodyguard before becoming minister, are also involved in the militarisation of children. The so-called "training" is designed primarily for schoolchildren aged 14-18, as well as Russians who volunteer for the war against Ukraine.