It has been two years since Anatol Jung last saw his children.
In 2013, the German native’s Ukrainian wife took their first son on a trip to Ukraine. She never returned. At the time, she was pregnant with their second son.
Jung has spent over six years fighting to have a relationship with his children. Under the best conditions, he was allowed to see them for six hours per month in his ex-wife’s presence. Under the worst, he went years without seeing them.
“No one ever accused me of being a bad father,” Jung told the Kyiv Post. However, “she denies me access, she denies my (child) support, and she has quiet support from the Soviet-minded authorities.”
Jung is far from alone. In Ukraine, thousands of fathers say that their former partners have prevented them from being part of their children’s lives, according to lawyers who have represented such disputes. The fathers find themselves tangled up years of court hearings.
But while Ukraine’s confusing legal system and byzantine bureaucracy are confusing for anyone, they are especially mystifying for foreign fathers who often don’t know the language.
Even when courts rule in their favor, it hardly helps. Legal experts say Ukraine has a longstanding problem with failing to enforce court decisions — particularly in custody battles, child abduction cases, and cases that blur the line between the two. The culprits are the country’s weak judiciary, ineffective police, and biased local government committees.
The Kyiv Post tried to contact mothers who allegedly kept their kids from their dads, but only one responded and consented to an interview. Jung’s ex-wife refused to answer her door, despite being home when the Kyiv Post came to ask for her comment, and didn’t answer requests for comment sent via Facebook.
Love gone wrong
Jung met his future wife, Iryna Jung, while hiking in Crimea in 2010. They were married in Kyiv and had their first son, Emil, there. The couple then moved to Munich County in Germany, where Jung worked as a safety engineer.
But after giving birth, Jung said that his wife became increasingly paranoid.
“She thought everybody would steal the boy,” said Jung. “I was so shocked.”
In late May 2013 – with another boy, Elias, on the way – Iryna Jung said she wanted to visit Ukraine with Emil for six weeks. Those six weeks passed, but she never returned.
After failing to convince her to come back with their son, in 2013 Jung filed an official child return claim with Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice through Germany’s Federal Justice Agency, pursuant to the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. Both countries are signatories to this international treaty, which mandates a child’s immediate return to his or her “country of habitual residence.”
Emil is a German citizen as well as Ukrainian. However, Ukraine does not recognize foreign citizenship status for Ukrainian citizens.
Ukrainian authorities didn’t respond to Jung’s claim for over a year. Eventually, the Pechersk District Court ordered Emil’s immediate return in 2014, but no one enforced it. Then, the Kyiv Court of Appeals scrapped the repatriation order, saying that Emil and Elias — who never lived in Germany — belong with their mother.
“My elder son is very undeveloped. He needs medical treatment. He has private German healthcare, but he can’t get it,” said Jung.
Jung tried to appeal to every legal and state agency he could find. Since Iryna lived in Kyiv’s Solomyansky District, the local Child Affairs Service conducted a hearing without Jung’s input and recommended allowing Jung to visit the boys for six hours each month. He flew in from Germany each month to do so, but says Iryna was unhappy with this arrangement.
A phone video taken by Jung during one visit shows Iryna snatching one of the boys away from him while complaining that Jung paid no child support.
But Jung says he switched to paying through his lawyer, which required Iryna to sign for it. But he says she refused to sign any documents, fearing deception. Lawyer Yevhen Pronin, who worked with Jung, confirmed this information.
Iryna refused to speak with the Kyiv Post but was once cornered by a television crew from the Ukrainian Channel 1+1. She told the 1+1 journalist that Jung is a Nazi sympathizer, doesn’t want the children, and just “wants revenge for Germany’s defeat in World War II.” Jung denied these allegations.
Eventually, she stopped allowing Jung to visit, either leaving the apartment or locking the door before he came. Jung says he has complained to local authorities 42 times about it. Police documents confirm his complaints, but the authorities told him that it would be impossible to enforce his visitation rights. The Solomyansky District Court wasn’t any more helpful.
A flurry of court cases, letters to the Ukrainian president and prime minister, and appeals to the German government and international bodies also bore no results, Jung said.
Local problem
Jung is not alone in Ukraine. There are thousands of similar cases in the country, only the vast majority don’t involve foreign fathers, according to legal experts.
One problem is Ukraine’s ongoing court reform, says Jung’s lawyer Pronin. Almost all cases are delayed for years as they move from judge to judge.
Additionally, the parent restricting access to the child often uses various procedural options to intentionally delay judicial proceedings for over a year, according to the Justice Ministry.
Even when the court reaches a decision in favor of the father, the ruling is seldom fulfilled.
The Justice Ministry frequently cannot enforce court decisions because it cannot establish a child’s whereabouts, or because one parent is restricting access to government agents, the ministry’s press service told the Kyiv Post in a written response.
Indeed, some fathers had to find their children using journalists or conducting their own investigations.
Several men told the Kyiv Post that when they turned to the police, some officers demanded bribes, while others were sympathetic but still did nothing.
After all these delays, “the child has already become accustomed to its new environment,” the Justice Ministry’s press service wrote.
Activists condemn both the actions of defendant parents and court inaction as violations of the child’s right to grow up knowing both parents.
“If you look at it from the parents’ point of view, they definitely have equal rights and responsibilities,” said Dmitry Bely, a Ukrainian activist and volunteer who helps dads in family abduction cases. “But it’s never seen from the point of view of the child. Regardless of what mom wants, a child has the right to uninterrupted contact with the father.”
Bely and Pronin both said that the problem is compounded by the fact that local childcare committees are staffed almost entirely by women, who they think are inclined to side with mothers.
Bely also lost access to his child, but managed to regain the ability to see her relatively quickly by Ukrainian standards — in just over one year.
“I was lucky,” he said. “Many fathers aren’t.”
Hard-fought compromise
Uwe also fought his way through Ukrainian bureaucracy. The German citizen asked for his last name to not be used, fearing retribution from the Ukrainian government for speaking against it. After his partner Alla moved back to Ukraine with their daughter in 2013, Uwe said he tried to convince her to come back. When this failed, he launched a child abduction complaint under the Hague convention, which Ukraine did not follow, he said.
“For the first four years, I couldn’t even communicate with my daughter,” said Uwe, who told Kyiv Post of combing through the streets of Kyiv and Alla’s small hometown in western Ukraine, desperately looking for them. “I can’t tell you what goes on in your brain when your child is missing.”
Uwe said he filed many police reports, which got him nowhere. Court hearings were sometimes called without him ever being notified or giving him very short notice to fly in from Germany. Courts said he missed deadlines when he didn’t. Uwe alleged that Alla’s father, an official at a local children affairs service, intervened to impede Uwe’s case.
This futile battle took years. The German says he passed through each kind of court twice: trial, appeals, and cassation. He lost his first case, won his appeal, but then cassation sent his case back to first instance. Even after going through all three instances again, he was not able to establish contact with his daughter. Meanwhile, Alla was hiding from him.
Alla met with Kyiv Post, but refused to provide her last name, saying she would be ashamed in front of her friends and family if her personal struggle was publicized. She said that she found the flurry of courts and paperwork bewildering – the same as it was for Uwe.
She added that she limited contact because she was afraid of the intensity with which Uwe sought his daughter’s return, even though he had never treated them badly. Alla said she feared that Uwe would take the girl and not allow her to return — the same thing Uwe accused Alla of doing.
“Sometimes, maybe I think I shouldn’t have done that,” she said of going into hiding. “I legitimately thought that she would be taken away. My mother’s instinct kicked in… We were just emotional. We were both desperate.”
A team of German television journalists helped Uwe track down Alla and their daughter to the Kyiv dormitory where they lived in 2017. At that point, Alla gave in and voluntarily made an arrangement with Uwe to let him visit his daughter. He bought a nearby apartment in Kyiv and now visits his daughter, buying her what she needs. She is now seven years old. He hadn’t interacted with her for four years of her life.
Uwe was always a good dad and remains one to date, Alla told the Kyiv Post. Uwe confirmed that they are on good terms now but he remains haunted by memories of his battle.
Still, his story ended better than some others. While Bely and Uwe get to see their kids, Jung is still struggling.
“The entire system is broken,” Jung said.
