The deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia constitutes a crime against humanity and a war crime, according to the UN.
Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia PHOTO: X
A new report by the International Independent Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine states that the Russian authorities “at the highest level” they deported “thousands” of children from the occupied areas of Ukraine.
“Direct involvement” of Vladimir Putin was “visible from the beginning“, the report adds, writes the BBC.
Ukraine says nearly 20,000 children have been illegally sent to Russia and Belarus.
The UN commission has so far identified 1,205 cases of children being taken from Ukrainian territories by Moscow in 2022.
The report shows that 80% of these children have not yet been returned, and many parents and guardians still do not know where the minors are.
This constitutes enforced disappearance and unjustified delay in repatriation, which are crimes against humanity and war crimes, respectively, according to the UN.
Most of the children named in the UN report lived in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics – Ukrainian regions over which Moscow illegally claims control.
The report shows that even before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow evacuated these children to the Russian Federation, claiming they were at risk of imminent attack from Ukraine. Then the children were placed in families or institutions and granted Russian citizenship.
Moscow has always denied allegations of abduction of children from Ukrainian territory.
Vladimir Putin once stated that “the story of “kidnapping children”… [era] exaggerated” and insisted that those children in question were “save” from a war zone. At the time, he also insisted that he was not “no problem” in would repatriate the children to their country of birth.
But Kiev has always maintained that was not the case, and the UN report shows that the children faced enormous difficulties on the journey back to Ukraine.
This forced removal and severing of ties with their homeland, combined with a “coercive environment” in Russia, “were a source of deep distress for the children,” according to the UN.
The children who manage to return suffer from “trauma, anxiety and fear of abandonment“, the report said, often because of harsh treatment in Russia. One child was told by staff at an orphanage in Russia that his country, Ukraine, “it's gone, everything's burned, and your parents are probably dead.”
“I'm still looking for my daughter and I'm very afraid of what she might think of me and how she survives [în Rusia]where many people hate Ukrainians”, the report cites a mother who has not been able to find her child.
In 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin, accusing him and his children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, of illegally deporting Ukrainian children.
Lvova-Belova gave an interview in which she described “receipt” to a 15-year-old boy from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, currently occupied by Russia, and “REEDUCATION” of him, despite the fact that “he didn't want to go” in Russia.
Ukraine says it has recovered 2,000 children so far.
The first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, would have been involved in facilitating the reunification of the children. Last year, she stated that she had a “open communication channel” with Putin, after he responded to his letter expressing his concern about the child victims of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine continues unabated despite several rounds of negotiations between teams of negotiators in Moscow and Kiev and, more recently, an American delegation.
The conflict, now in its fifth year, has killed more than 15,000 civilians, injured more than 41,300 and displaced 3.7 million.
