13-Year-Old Girl Added to Ukrainian Hit List
Child-writer doxed online after appealing to UN on behalf of Donbas children
“War is air raids, the rumble of artillery and tanks, the cannonade of gunfire… It has many sounds and many faces. It sneaks up and falls on you with all its force when you least expect it. And as you hide, you count the bursts. One. Two. Three… God, thanks for passing. And then the guns go silent. And in that silence, you hear a baby crying. Quiet sobs, like a kitten’s meow. And then the shelling begins again, drowning out everything… That is why war children are quiet. They know their cries will go unheard.”
— Faina Savenkova, “Children’s Cry of Victory.” Written in 2020 at age 11
At the tender age of eleven, Faina Savenkova was already hardened by war. She had been surrounded by it most of her life. Among her earliest memories is a tableau of explosions, air raids, crying, death and dying.
In her home city of Lugansk, she has known little else but war for eight long years, since the Maidan coup and overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, when the bombs started falling on the Russian-speaking residents of the Donbas region. The war has been going on since she learned to walk.
“Now I am 11 years old,” she wrote in an essay titled “Children’s Laughter of Victory,” in 2020. “Half of my life is war. I don’t know how children like me felt in that difficult and terrible year of 1941, but it seems to me that it is similar to everything that children in Lugansk and Donetsk are experiencing now.”
By the age of 13, she was already a prolific author, her brilliant young mind churning out essays, plays, short stories and novellas. Her works have been short-listed for various literary awards in Russia. Her words have been published around the world, translated into English, Serbian, Italian, Bulgarian, Arabic, French and German.
She began co-authoring with an adult writer and successful novelist, Aleksandr Kontorovich, who has been trying to tell people in the western hemisphere about the ongoing shelling of civilians in Donbas and the threat to children in the region. Their first collaboration was titled “The World That Doesn’t Exist,” followed by a novel about the children of Donbas titled “Those who stand behind your shoulder.”
But it wasn’t her fiction which got Faina’s name published on Mirotvorets, a notorious Ukrainian website which lists the names and personal information of people deemed “enemies of Ukraine.”
It was her truth.
Faina’s writing is immensely popular in Russia and other former Soviet countries, especially among young readers. As she grew more confident in her writing, she began to take a public stand for the children of war-torn Donbas. She contacted various international organizations and, at the age of 13, she sent a video-letter to the United Nations, calling for an end to the genocide of children in her part of the world. The video was aired during a Security Council meeting.
“I want the United Nations not to forget that we, the children of Donbas, also have the right to childhood and a peaceful life… I want you to remember the smiles of your children. We, too, want to smile, we want to be happy, we want to choose our future and we just want to live,” Faina said.
Two months later, Mirotvorets, which means “Peacemaker” in Ukrainian, added her name as an “enemy of Ukraine.”
Since at least 2015, the website has been up and running with a database that displays the names, addresses and other personal data of thousands of writers, journalists, dissidents and others. One Italian journalist and at least two Russian ones have already been killed and over their faces, in red letters, the word “liquidated” was printed in Ukrainian.
The website published Faina’s personal data including her home address and links to her personal accounts and social networks.
In June, Faina’s mother, anxious for her daughter’s safety, contacted a Russian organization known as “The Foundation to Battle Injustice.” The foundation contacted the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine demanding to block the website and remove its database from the internet.
Faina told the Foundation to Battle Injustice that after she was doxed by Mirotvorets, she began receiving threats, including threats of physical violence. She said that militants belonging to the neo-Nazi “Azov” Battalion had threatened to kill her and kill her whole family in front of her. She was forced to contact law enforcement agencies in order to obtain personal protection.
Faina had already contacted the UN again, writing a letter to Secretary General Antonio Guterres in which she pleaded for him to influence the government of Ukraine to block the Mirotvorets site. In response, a representative of the UN secretary general only urged Ukrainian authorities to stop using children for political purposes.
So Faina reached out to the political and spiritual leaders of Europe, calling for an end to the mass killing of civilians in eastern Ukraine. She wrote letters to French President Emmanuel Macron, Pope Francis, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British rock musician Roger Waters. She only wanted one thing, she said: To be heard.
All Faina received in reply were automated responses.
Despite that, the girl still believes that her appeal “will save at least one child’s life in the Donbas.”
The Foundation to Battle Injustice made a legal assessment of the Ukrainian website, determining that the site violates not only the criminal code of Ukraine, but also openly calls for the assassination of journalists and public figures whose public opinions are not in lockstep with Kiev. The Foundation maintains that the existence of the site and especially the publication of the personal data of minors violates international norms.
In November of 2021, representatives of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) postponed a meeting with Faina, with their apologies. They were supposed to have met with her to look into her situation. They gave assurances that they would meet with her another time, according to the Foreign Minister of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), but no date has been set.
Earlier, Faina published an open letter to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and UNICEF in which she told them of Mirotvorets’ publishing of her personal data and she urged UNICEF to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to do something about it.
According to an article published by Strana (“Country”), the Ukrainian president said at a press conference that he did not have the authority to close down the site. However, he apparently did have the authority to block Strana and several other websites critical of the Kiev regime.
Strana quoted a researcher from Human Rights Watch who said, “We have heard about this list, although we do not have complete information. One thing we can say is that if this list is used by some groups or individuals as a guide to action, to physical reprisal, this is a very disturbing thing.”
Amnesty International had previously linked Mirotvorets to political murders in Poroshenko-era Ukraine:
“The existence of such a site is one of those things that points to a possible political background to these murders,” Denis Krivosheev, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia program, reported in 2015.
The International Committee to Protect Journalists, the European Union, OSCE and even the US State Department condemned the Ukrainian website in 2016, after Mirotovorets publicized the personal data of thousands of journalists and human rights activists working in Donbas.
Elizabeth Trudeau, a representative of the US Department of State, called what happened a “hack,” according to Strana:
“We are aware that the personal data of journalists who have covered and continue to cover events in eastern Ukraine have reportedly been hacked. The United States supports the principle of press freedom. The work of journalists is of great importance, especially in countries where civil and political rights are under threat. Also in conflict zones, that’s why we have concerns.”
“This is a very troubling situation that could further jeopardize the safety of journalists. Journalists cover issues of public interest and should not be persecuted for performing their professional duties,” said Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) representative Dunja Mijatovic.
The Committee to Protect Journalists stated that hackers and the website put media workers in danger. The Association of International Broadcasting called on all those mentioned in the list to take precautionary measures.
The BBC said that in response to the Mirotvorets’ list, they immediately did everything necessary to protect journalists and their right to privacy. “We are aware that the accreditation details of a number of media outlets, including the BBC, have been hacked. We immediately took the necessary steps to protect journalists and their right to privacy,” the BBC wrote in a statement.
But despite all of these statements of concern and condemnation, despite several investigations conducted by international human rights organizations, Mirotvorets is still up and running all these years later. In 2022, the names and personal information of all those people are still there for all the world to see.
“Like the yellow star symbol that the Nazis forced ethnic Jews to wear during the Holocaust,” wrote Mira Terada of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, “the ‘Mirotvorets’ website puts its stigma on a huge number of innocent people, including children, thereby humiliating their human dignity.”
“I don’t know how the story with Mirotvorets will end,” Faina said in another interview with Donbas Insider. “All I know is that I am right. I have no hatred towards Ukraine or anyone else. I have many friends in Russia, Ukraine and Europe. I hope it will continue like this. Of course, people have started to try to portray me as evil incarnate, a tool of the Kremlin, but this is all so ridiculous. But it’s probably more convenient for these people. It’s always difficult to admit mistakes, it’s easier to blame someone else for all the bad things. Even if it’s a child.”
The girl, now 13, has said that she feels “honored” to be on the list.
“I didn’t do anything to get myself on the site’s database,” she told Strana, “Many people I know wrote to me that I was on ‘Mirotvorets.’ I was surprised, but I think it’s honorable because there are a lot of famous people, writers and more.”
Though she has appealed to every possible authority, the site remains active and the danger to her has not abated. But whatever comes of that, she is unlikely to give up her writing.
“The main message that I want to convey to everyone is that we are all human beings, residents of the same planet,” Faina said. “And we must look for what we have in common, not what separates us. But to do that, you have to learn to listen and hear not only ourselves but also others. Although in fairy tales, I sometimes raise more personal topics.”
About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.
