If the Putin regime’s narrative is to be believed, Russia is rescuing orphans from Ukraine and children left in the grip of the war, most of whom have a custodian’s permit to be brought to Russia. Unfortunately, the facts indicate that Russia is systematically deporting Ukrainian children to Russia or areas controlled by it, and then also cutting them off from their language and culture through brainwashing and Russification.
“Both adults and children are taken away by force. These are both children from orphanages and children with parents. And also children who are separated from their families,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in June 2022, when the full-scale war had just begun.
At the meeting of the International Coalition on the Repatriation of Ukrainian Children held in Kyiv in December 2023, he confirmed that 19,000 children had been taken away. “Russia is deliberately breaking all ties between Ukrainian children and their relatives. Children are told lies about Ukraine and the war, they are adopted illegally, even when they say they have relatives in Ukraine,” Zelenskyi said.
What is Russia’s narrative?
Russia has consistently denied Ukraine’s accusations. “Russia did not kidnap but saved Ukrainian children by taking them away from the war zone. Should the orphanages really have been left under artillery fire?” said Vladimir Putin.
According to the Russian president, there will be no problems with the return of children to Ukrainian parents or relatives, if there should be any. “For example, we had such a specific case: the mother lived with the child in Russia, the mother died, the father stayed in Ukraine, and the child is alone. Of course, we are ready to give the child to the father. There are no problems,” Putin claimed in July 2023.
He called it “absolutely legal” to take the children out of Ukraine—to save their health and lives—and assured that no one was going to separate the children from their parents. “Of course, if their relatives show up, no obstacles have been put in place and will not be done in the future,” Putin assured.
According to Mariya Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights under Putin’s influence, Russia is not doing anything illegal by issuing Russian passports to children, because it does not change their Ukrainian citizenship, but complements it – Russia gives children a chance. And the talk about thousands of children who cannot be reunited with their families is wrong, according to her, because Moscow has received a statement from Kyiv about only 11 children. Most Ukrainian children arrived in Russia with their parents.
Lvova-Belova’s report states that in the summer and autumn of 2022, parents from Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions and elsewhere sent their children on vacation, including to protect them from hostilities. Parents authorized escorts with whom children arrived at sanatoriums and recreation facilities in Crimea and the nearby Krasnodar region.
Unfortunately, their return was much more complicated.
How did it start, and what did the West do?
The first data on the deportation of children from Ukrainian territories dates back to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and the separatist people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk emerged in eastern Ukraine. Massive reports of this began to come after the start of full-scale military operations in February 2022. Over a year, they accumulated so much that in March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Lvova-Belova.
“Based on the evidence collected and analyzed by my office, based on its independent investigation, the Pre-Investigation Chamber has confirmed that there are strong grounds to believe that President Putin and Mrs. Lvova-Belova are criminally responsible for the illegal deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from the territories of Ukraine occupied by Russia to the territory of the Russian Federation, which is contrary to the Rome Statute,” confirmed the head of the Hague Criminal Court, Karim A. A. Khan, in an official announcement of the KC.
“My office has identified cases involving at least hundreds of children deported from orphanages and foster homes. Many of them are said to have been given for adoption by the Russian Federation,” the announcement said, noting that Putin’s decree in May 2022 created accelerated options for granting Russian citizenship to children to make it easier for Russian families to adopt them. The Hague Criminal Court concludes that the purpose of these actions is to permanently remove the children from their home country, while the children were protected by the Geneva Convention during deportation.
However, earlier, in July 2022, sanctions were imposed on Lvova-Belova by the European Union and in January 2023 by Japan. Lvova-Belova is a Putin’s party politician and government official who was accused by Ukrainian and British officials even then of leading the forced deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children. As a symbol, she fits the narrative of Putin’s regime perfectly: she is the mother of five biological and allegedly 18 adopted children and a faithful wife.
How many children have been deported and where?
It is not known exactly how many children under Lvova-Belova’s leadership have been removed from Ukraine, as well as how many have been adopted and how many are in welfare institutions. A July 2023 report by the Lvova-Belova office states that Russia has taken in 4.8 million Ukrainians, 700,000 of whom are children, since the start of the “special operation”. The document, which is no longer publicly available, states that 1,500 children have either lost parental care or come from orphanages.
In December 2022, Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets announced that Moscow is forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of children to Russia. “The authorities have already identified more than 13,000 children deported to Russia. We don’t know the exact number, but according to our data, we can assume that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children were forcibly removed from the country,” said Lubinets.
In December 2023, Kyiv put the number of deported children at 19,000.
Deported children have been taken to institutions across Russia, as far as the Pacific Ocean (see map), but the research institution The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) found in its comprehensive report that at least 2,442 Ukrainian children between the ages of 6 and 17 have been taken to Belarus between the start of full-scale war and 30 October 2023. As Belarus and Russia coordinate the deportation of children from occupied territories of Ukraine and subject the children to re-education, which includes military base training, this makes Belarus complicit in the crime.
How to solve the problem?
It is difficult for parents to search for their children because Russia does not officially share any information about children. Russified names and new documents also make searching more difficult.
If the location of the child can also be identified, the parent(s) cannot go directly to Russia, but through Europe, then to Belarus and from there to Russia. Even then, getting the child back may not be successful, as Russian officials may demand a DNA test or simply refuse.
Moscow and Kyiv do not communicate directly on the topic of children, because it is not a prisoner exchange, but civilians and children. The secret talks have been mediated by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Ukraine is trying to get back both those children who are in Russian orphanages and those who have been adopted into the families of Russian foster parents. According to Financial Times sources, the issue of deported children was raised at the G20 meeting by Saudi Arabia, which was approved by Western countries to mediate the talks.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Qatar announced in October 2023 that the country’s negotiators succeeded in securing the return of four Ukrainian children to their families, which is the beginning of the return of a larger number of children to Ukraine.
According to the data of the end of 2023, it has been possible to bring back at least 370 Ukrainian children. Zelenskyi has said that the goal is to bring back all the children.
Was it intentional?
Presumably, in the beginning, it was not a deliberate plan to abduct children en masse, but when it started, all levels of power were involved, a complete system was built, by the military who captured the children, from the transport and logistics system to the orphanages, where they were forced to wear military uniforms and the sing Russian national anthem.
The program revealed that Estonian people are also engaged in searching for missing children in Ukraine and reuniting them with their families using the Internet and social media.
“We now know that this is a systematic policy and involves multiple levels of government, from doctors to teachers and local officials to governors and all the way to the top, the Kremlin,” said Ukrainian child abduction researcher Tetiana Fedosiuk.
The aforementioned Yale HRL report, which is one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject, also confirms that it is a systematic activity of Russia and Belarus. The study concludes that the abduction of children contravenes Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which states: “Individual or mass resettlement of protected persons, as well as their deportation from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying state or any other state, whether occupied or not, is prohibited for any reason.”
Human Rights Watch also estimates that Russia has engaged in the violent deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia or territory controlled by it, which is a war crime.
What does this narrative tell us?
In the documentary Stolen Children of Ukraine: Inside the Russian Camps (2023), Lvova-Belova sums up the Russian narrative in one of the few interviews on the subject with foreign media. In response to the question of whether making Ukrainian children Russian citizens does not serve the purpose of destroying the national identity, he said: “There is no violent granting of Russian citizenship. Not a single child has been taken away without the guardian’s permission, all have been taken away voluntarily, based on permission,” said Lvova-Belova.
The claim that the children were only taken with the authority of the guardian is unfortunately false, as there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. The makers of the documentary were also able to confirm this on the spot, finding evidence and witnesses that Russian soldiers simply took children away from a school during a flash operation and later deported these children to the vastness of Russia. The returned children have also said that no one asked them if they wanted Russian citizenship or to be removed from school.
When Lvova-Belova was asked if she considers herself a war criminal, she laughed and replied that she considers herself a mother, besides, Russia does not recognize the Hague Criminal Court, while the Rome Statute allows the removal of people from war zones. This is also a skewed statement because the Rome Statute only allows the deportation of people to third countries in cases of imminent danger.
No matter how you look at it, the evidence and Russia’s past narratives suggest that deporting children, brainwashing them, giving them Russian citizenship, and preventing them from returning to Ukraine serve the purposes of assimilation, Russification, weakening Ukraine, increasing Russia’s population, and, pragmatically, increasing the number of future soldiers. After all, Russia’s population is in a downward trend and the demographic picture does not inspire optimism; by 2050, the number of Russian inhabitants is predicted to be 133 million instead of the current 144 million.
Unfortunately, in this case, the victims are children who cannot protect themselves. Significantly, the Criminal Court in The Hague declared Putin and his henchmen wanted on charges of war crimes against children.
The used images are screenshots from the referenced pages. The infographic was created by the editorial team of Propastop.
