AFP- Hungarian police said Monday that the Russian mother of a three-year-old snatched from her French father last month has been arrested with the toddler on the border with Ukraine.
   
"Yesterday early afternoon a Russian citizen with a small girl wanted to pass the Hungarian-Ukrainian border by car at Tiszabecs," in eastern Hungary, Gergely Fulop, a spokesman of Szabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg county police, told AFP.
   
"The border guard checked the Schengen database and found that the woman was wanted for a criminal act while the small child, born in 2005, had been reported missing," Fulop said.
   
"The woman was taken into custody in Nyiregyhaza, while the child is in a child care institution," he added.
   
"We have notified the Russian consul in Hungary, who has already visited the woman, as well as the French authorities and the father, who is on his way to Hungary."
   
Three-year-old Elise Andre, at the centre of an international custody battle between her father Jean-Michel Andre and her Russian mother Irina Belenkaya, was abducted by two men and a woman in the southern French city of Arles on March 20.
   
The father, who was badly beaten during the kidnapping, later told AFP that the woman -- dressed in black and wearing a wig -- was certainly his estranged wife, from whom he split in 2007.
   
Interpol issued a search notice for the toddler on March 22 after France had already alerted police across Europe.
   
Russian authorities said they would inform the French if the girl turned up in Russia, but warned they would not arrest the mother.
   
Andre himself abducted the daughter from a street in Moscow last year after Belenkaya took her to Russia against his will and in defiance of a French court ruling.
   
A Russian court has also awarded Belenkaya custody rights.
   
Andre, who left Sunday night for Hungary, was now hoping to bring Elise back to France within 48 hours, according to his lawyer Victor Gioia, who said the father wanted to "avoid causing further distress to the child."
   
"He wants his daughter to have a more or less normal life," Gioia added. "He does not want another round of trench warfare against the mother."
   
Elise was being kept at a childcare facility in Nyirszolos, not far from Nyiregyhaza, where her mother was in custody, police spokesman Fulop told AFP.
   
The child will be handed over to her father upon proof of his guardianship, he added.
   
"After getting over the first shock, Elise is feeling all right, she is out playing with the other kids," the director of the childcare centre in Nyirszolos, Edvin Ziman, told AFP.
   
"Of course it is not easy when a three-year-old is taken from her mother. She speaks little Russian so the language of communication is French," he noted, adding that a local French teacher had been called in to help.
   
"We explained to her that her mother is all right and that her father will arrive here around 4:00 or 5:00 pm this afternoon to pick her up."
   
"She is a very communicative and friendly child who is now completely calm and is playing with the five other kids outside," Ziman added.
   
Fulop said the car with Hungarian plates in which Belenkaya and her daughter were found was driven by a man. The driver, who had a Hungarian name, was not detained.