My brother was taken by Putin aged 11 - so I went to rescue him in Russia

 With each parroted lie about Russia's war in Ukraine, Ksenia Koldin could feel her 11-year-old brother slipping away. "I don't want to return," he repeated over and over. "In Russia, I'm happy. I have friends fighting against the Ukrainian Nazis. No one needed me in Ukraine and the Nazis will kill me."

Ksenia's heart was pounding. How had a two-week trip to a children's summer camp led to the boy renouncing his identity and rejecting the last remaining member of his immediate family?

The pair of orphaned siblings were living in Vovchansk when Vladimir Putin launched his vicious invasion in 2022. They'd clung to each other beneath floorboards during the relentless bombardment, knowing there was little to be done if a rocket hit their building.

Once Russia had established a stranglehold on the Ukrainian city, Ksenia and her brother learnt there was another type of violence for innocent children like them to face: the destruction of identity.

"If you live in an occupied territory, you have no right to choose: you are Russian," the 19-year-old recalls. "You have no right to refuse them. If you did, there are not very good consequences; it could cost you your life."

The effort to scrub the Ukrainian from the children began with her brother. Ksenia had a bad feeling from the moment that he was invited to a summer camp in Russia by an older 16-year-old friend theboy admired.

But her doubts about the trip matteredlittle. She was a 15-year-old whose status as a Ukrainian citizen had been ripped from her after the Russian invasion. "My voice was not important," she adds.

The teenager was right to have concerns because it soon became clear that those who spirited the 11-year-old away had no plans to return the boy to his sister.

"The summer camp was meant to be two or three weeks - but it was after five that my brother was sent to a Russian foster family," says Ksenia.

"I was very nervous because I didn't know what the Russians could do. He was only an 11-year-old and maybe they had some paper that would let them take him forever."

She, however, was not going to give up. She sourced a Russian SIM card and kept speaking to her brother.

Not long after, she found that the occupiers were pushing her to leave Ukraine as well. "She has to go to study at a Russian technical school," Ksenia's schoolteacher informed her foster mother.

And so it was that the young woman also found herself in a college dormitory under relentless pressure to renounce her Ukrainian identity. "You can take a Russian passport," she was told. "Then you can have a big house and earn lots of money every month. You're going to live this great life."

These visions of a glorious future were paired with a criminalisation of her Ukrainian past.

"You cannot speak Ukrainian or have a Ukrainian [political] position," explains Ksenia. "If Russians listen to you speaking Ukrainian, they can call the police or military. Russia wants to erase our Ukrainian identity. [I felt like I was] committing a crime if I spoke Ukrainian." Once the Russian state decided Ksenia wasn't going to be brainwashed, she was abandoned.

"After three months, I was kicked out from the dormitory and left on the street without any money and support because I was Ukrainian with a Ukrainian position," she remembers. "For me, this was not the scariest thing that could have happened because the Russians can do anything.

"The fact that they kicked me out was the most favourable outcome. I understood that it was a kind of performance because they could not convince me."

Despite being abandoned on the streets and left for dead, Ksenia refused to back down. She found somewhere to stay and vowed to get her brother back to Ukraine.

It was hard to know how she could possibly do it. With every passing day, she knew more Russian indoctrination would seep into his developing mind.

But she got a ray of hope when winter arrived and her brother told her that "maybe, yes" he would return to Ukraine.

Help in Ksenia's mission to rescue her brother was provided by the charity Save Ukraine. The organisation, founded during the early days of the 2014 conflict in Eastern Ukraine, specialises in rescuing children abducted by Russia and supporting families affected by disappearances. Ksenia was told she needed specific "Ukrainian documents to establish her 'right to take her brother'."

But as she made her preparations, her brother's Russian foster family learnt of the plan to bring him back and cut off all contact. Her brother was moved to a new town, Abinsk, making things more complicated.

After tying her up with bureaucracy, Russian social services told Ksenia her brother didn't want to return and warned her that if her brother still refused to come after she spoke to him, he would "stay forever in Russia".

But even this didn't deter her. And more than a year after the full-scale invasion wrecked their lives and split up their family, Ksenia embarked on a three-day journey to bring her brother home.

Knowing only his town and address, she contacted her brother's Russian social worker and insisted on meeting him.

After initially refusing, she was allowed to meet with the foster parents also present.

When she embraced her brother and found him pulling away, Ksenia feared the worst. It was then that he started calling Ukrainians "Nazis" and told her he wasn't coming back.

Ksenia knew that he might speak differently if not surrounded by the Russian foster parents and social worker. So, in a last gasp effort, she asked to take him for ice cream.

Over spoonfuls of ice cream and chocolate flakes, she proposed a compromise: "Come to Ukraine and if you don't like it, you can return to Russia," she told him.

Much to the shock of his Russian foster parents, the boy agreed, telling them he wanted to go back with his sister. The pair left together and have not been separated since.

There's a strong likelihood that, had he not asserted that desire to return so forcefully that day, he might have never returned.

Not that Ksenia ever would have given up.

"I told myself that I would not return without my brother," she says. "It was a mission to bring him back and I was led by the confidence that I would do it no matter what. And with my love for Ukraine."

She believes the only reason Russia took such an interest in her brother was to feed its military meat grinder and is determined that her story help shine a light on these cynical efforts to steal children for cannon fodder.

"Every day, Ukrainian children [turned] into Russians are sent to the front line to fight the country where they were born", she says. "I have a very important mission: I [am the] voice of all orphans and children who have been in a situation like that."