Imagine going to the park with your kids. Then they’re gone. And they keep being gone ...

Two of Rachael Neustadt’s sons have been abducted by their Russian father. Charlotte Edwardes on her harrowing fight to get them back
Charlotte Edwardes12 August 2013

Rachael Neustadt is relating, as calmly as she can, how her sons Daniel, seven, and Jonathan, five, came to be abducted by their father Ilya Neustadt, 36, a lecturer at London Metropolitan University. They are facts she has repeated often: that the children boarded a flight from Heathrow to Moscow on Christmas Day last year for a two-week holiday with her ex-husband, ostensibly to visit his half-brother.

On January 7 this year, surrounded by “welcome home” banners, she received an email from Ilya. The boys were not on their London-bound flight, he wrote. Furthermore, they would not be home for the foreseeable future.

Since then, Ilya has defied numerous orders from the High Court demanding that he return the children (they are now wards of court). Rachael’s only hope is the Russian courts.

On June 1 the Russian Federation officially recognised measures set out in the Hague Convention of 1996 that deal with the protection of children. Rachael Neustadt’s case will be the first time the abduction treaty has been used between Britain and Russia. Last week the Russian judge assigned to the case set the hearing for September 11. “This delay seems unconscionable,” says Neustadt.

Stories such as hers, however, are increasingly common. Government figures show that the number of child abduction cases dealt with by the Foreign Office has jumped by 88 per cent in under a decade. Up to a third of children taken to countries that are signatories to the convention are not home within a year, despite the treaty’s emphasis on speed of return.

Rachael is determined to be positive, despite the setback. “I have to be,” she says. We’re in her small, hot sitting room in Hendon. On the walls are her children’s drawings, curling at the edges now: a scarlet poppy for Remembrance Sunday, a Union Jack of ruled lines, carefully coloured. There are awards for Jonathan “for always producing excellent work” and a creative writing prize. There is Daniel’s graduation from kindergarten — his certificate for completing Reception notably absent. A huddle of photographs show Daniel and Jonathan with their brother Meir, 19 months. Mercifully, Rachael has Meir with her. He thumps over to offer me a toy.

Neustadt, 35, is a US citizen. She first met Ilya, who grew up in Moscow but moved to Berlin in his teens, at a friend’s wedding. They married in Berlin in 2004 after a short engagement and moved first to Switzerland — where Daniel and Jonathan were born — then to London.

After time, Rachael “was driven to move out” of the family home and into sheltered accommodation. She discovered she was pregnant with Meir only after she’d left.

Initially Ilya was allowed supervised contact with his sons and gradually, after he submitted to anger management counselling and parenting sessions, it became unsupervised and overnight.

The trip to Russia was the boys’ first holiday abroad with their father. Ilya arranged for his mother, Irina Mogilewski, to fly from Berlin to Moscow “to supervise”. He insisted on getting the boys Russian passports because “he said that it would ‘facilitate border crossing. Visas are complicated and expensive’”.

Christmas Day 2012 “was a chilly morning with a bit of fog”, Rachael remembers. They sat on the thin staircase outside her flat waiting for Ilya. “I had bought them all new clothing for their trip and packed my biggest suitcase,” she says. “Ilya was late. I was glad, because it gave us extra minutes together. I repeated that I loved them very much and would miss them but that they would have a wonderful time. I told them not to worry, that we would speak every other day by phone or Skype. It was hard for me to imagine being separated from them for two weeks but I was trying to do the right thing.”

Ilya had provided a false address for his half-brother, Pavel, and, having dropped the boys with his mother in Moscow he “snuck” back to London to pack up his flat — just five minutes down the road from where Rachael was preparing for the boys’ return, wrapping presents.

Ilya resigned his job, shipped his possessions to Berlin and redirected his mail. Then he flew back to Russia.

Shortly after sending his devastating email on January 7, he called. “He said, ‘We’re in a hotel. I’ll be in touch’. Then he hung up. I didn’t know where they were.”

She tries to describe how she felt. “Imagine going to the park with your kids. You’re having fun, everything’s fine, normal, and then you turn round and they’re gone. And they keep being gone. You’d go into complete and utter panic.” Her voice snags and her eyes prick. “You’d run from that park screaming. Screaming for hours. The intensity doesn’t let up.” She wipes her eyes. “I didn’t sleep for a month. I was on the phone or email 20 hours a day.”

Rachael’s mother Merry flew in from Colorado to look after Meir, and she left for Moscow.

“It was February. It was my attempt to try to convince him. I told him I was coming to talk face to face and work it out. He was extremely hostile. He threatened me in multiple ways. He was in control now and I had to listen because the alternative was that I would never see the kids again. If I didn’t listen he would arrange for bad things to happen to me.”

She waited a week to see them for two hours. “We were under strict surveillance so I couldn’t ask questions. Daniel was particularly quiet and he clung to me. When it was time for me to leave, Jonathan asked me if I was coming back the next day. My heart was breaking. Daniel asked me: ‘When are you coming back, Mummy, when?’ Walking out was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.”

In the spring — after raising money through a Facebook site called Bring Back My Boys — Rachael flew out again. She waited five hours at a prearranged point in a shopping centre. They didn’t show. The next day it was six hours in a museum. She finally saw the boys — briefly. On her last trip she didn’t see them at all, because, Daniel said, “Papa has forbidden it”.

Both boys have had birthdays: Daniel in March, Jonathan in May. “Daniel has lost a load of teeth and Jonathan is so tall,” she says. Ilya allows Skype sessions about four times a month.

“I have to be careful,” she says. “When I tell them, ‘I love you so much’, he hangs up. So I stick to, ‘How are you? Did you have a nice day? Do you remember this song?’ He’s always there, hovering, instructing them not to answer questions.

“I have nightmares. I really worry for them. The whole experience is traumatic and I can’t imagine what kind of damage it’s causing.”

And then, before she is overwhelmed again, she repeats her mantra. “But I feel positive. I have to. For the boys.”

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