The UN has encouraged Russia to return the “forcibly taken” Ukrainian children
This action spotlights a history of coerced relocations amidst growing global anxieties about Russia's actions in Ukraine.
The UN General Assembly has insisted that Russia repatriate Ukrainian youngsters who were detached from their families and relocated to Russia since 2014, when Moscow occupied Crimea.
In a newly approved resolution—approved with 91 affirmative votes, 12 dissenting, and 57 abstentions—the UN urged Russia to “guarantee the prompt, secure, and unconditional return of all Ukrainian children who have been forcibly moved or expelled.”
The resolution asserts that Moscow's deeds contravene global regulations, which forbid the “compulsory transfer or expulsion of protected individuals from occupied lands.”
“It is inconceivable that anyone could consider children as spoils of conflict,” stated Ukraine's deputy Foreign Minister, Mariana Betsa. She indicated that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been banished to Russia. Russia dismissed the resolution, with its ambassador, Maria Zabolotskaya, denouncing it as a “particularly deceitful falsehood.”
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The Ukrainian administration asserts that numerous hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly relocated to Russia, with over 19,000 instances identified. Experts at Yale University approximate that 35,000 children have been taken from Ukraine to more than 100 sites in Russia and territories under Russian occupation.
To date, Ukraine has managed to recover 1,859 children who were “kidnapped by Russia,” Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska mentioned on Monday during a high-profile gathering in Paris.
A 2023 Yale report pinpointed 43 locations that purportedly housed thousands of Ukrainian children following Russia's incursion in February 2022. The report detailed that parents provided consent “under pressure” to permit their children to participate in leisure camps. Certain facilities placed children into foster situations or adoption in Russia, despite numerous having parents in Ukraine.
Ukraine intends to pursue a case regarding abducted children in international tribunals as a war crime. In August, Ukrainian prosecutors recognized three individuals suspected in the abduction of 15 children from a school in a region under Russian control.
More than two years prior, on March 15, 2023, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine determined that Russian authorities had perpetrated a wide array of breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law in various Ukrainian regions and the Russian Federation. The report conveyed that these transgressions encompassed war crimes such as “intentional killings, assaults on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape, and compulsory transfers and deportations of children.”
Two days afterward, the International Criminal Court issued arrest orders for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children's rights. The ICC accused them of direct accountability for the extensive damaging deportation of Ukrainian children to Russian-held areas, which it affirmed constitutes a war crime under international law.
Apart from Russia's enforced deportations, some children who remained in Ukraine without families and under government oversight encountered a different array of atrocities. An inquiry by OCCRP and its Ukrainian affiliate Slidstvo documented the mistreatment and neglect of hundreds of orphans evacuated by a private charity to a Turkish coastal city, where they were subjected to physical aggression and received inadequate medical attention and schooling.
