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She's very good at it, her proud father puffs, as proud fathers do, and he's hoping she will make friends with some of the other children and gain a little more confidence. Later this month he even hopes she can start school in their home city of Houston, Texas. But she will need a few more words of English first, he concedes. At the moment, she still struggles in any language other than Russian. Almost two months ago, Nina was taken secretly from Moscow, where she lived with her mother, and whisked out of the country to be reunited with her father, Larry Whyte, a British-born businessman who has lived in the US since Nina is doing fine, Whyte insists: he's had her checked by a doctor and a psychiatrist to make sure she hasn't been harmed by her experiences.
But he acknowledges that she has gone through an extraordinary ordeal. It's a story of paranoia and mistrust, involving the criminal justice system of three countries, the FBI, immigration authorities and child protection officers around the world, and Russian militiamen.
And at the centre of it all, a tiny child who loves gymnastics and swimming, and has no idea of the scale of the battle that has been fought over her. Whyte is cagey about exactly how he was reunited with his daughter, beyond saying that she was smuggled out of Russia, and they met in an unnamed European country, where he notified the FBI that they were on their way back to the States.
But while he admits that the methods he employed to get his daughter back are unorthodox at best, he argues that his action was the only way to right a bigger wrong. In Nina was snatched by her Russian mother while she visited her on holiday; her father did not even know where she had been taken but finally tracked her down to Moscow. Three years on, having exhausted all avenues in the US, British and Russian courts, he felt his only option was to take matters into his own hands.
It is an extraordinary tale, but Whyte's experience, in suddenly losing his child to an embittered former partner and a foreign jurisdiction, is by no means unique. Last month, Fiona Cameron, from Ross and Cromarty, was reunited with her year-old daughter Sasha 27 months after her ex-husband kidnapped the child during a holiday in France. She had had no news of her daughter until she was tracked to Indonesia on October 15; Sasha's father Robert had already been sentenced in absentia to a year in prison by the French courts.
Increased travel and immigration, and less formal family arrangements, have meant that the problem has become an enormous headache for the authorities, quite apart from the individual tragedies that each case represents. Nina was born in January , while Whyte and his then wife Marsha, a Russian who acquired British citizenship through her marriage, were living in Houston. It was a tempestuous relationship, and the marriage had effectively broken down by the time Nina was born.
The divorce was a particularly messy one but the two eventually agreed to share custody of the child, though she had to remain in Houston, and lived mainly with her father. In August , while Nina's mother had the child with her on holiday in France, the pair disappeared. Marsha had taken the child to Moscow to her father's apartment, though her ex-husband did not know where they had gone. The trail went suddenly, horrifyingly, cold. Many countries have agreed clear protocols for the recovery of children kidnapped by a parent, but implementing them effectively can be a different matter.
The Hague convention on the civil aspects of international child abduction states that a kidnapped child should be returned to his or her country of normal residence, and any ruling on where the child should live should be carried out in that country, based on the child's best interest. It may appear straightforward, says Denise Carter, director of Reunite, but there is wide scope for interpretation.
The treaty is quite a blunt instrument; 64 members have signed up to it but pretty much all of them have different legal systems and understandings of how it should be implemented. Some countries are particularly notorious in the way they choose to interpret the convention, notably Germany, Austria and Sweden. Despite ratifying the treaty in , Germany is accused of consistently violating the treaty and favouring the custody applications of its own citizens.
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