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11-06-2025
KYIV: Russian President Vladimir Putin faces criminal charges for the “unlawful deportation and transfer of children”.
That is the definition of the 2023 arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, the intergovernmental tribunal based in The Hague.
On June 2, as ceasefire talks rumbled on, Ukrainian diplomats handed their Russian counterparts a list of hundreds of children that they said were taken from Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions since 2022.
The return of these children “could become the first test of the sincerity of (Russia’s) intentions” to reach a peace settlement, Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, told media. “The ball is in Russia’s corner” but Ukraine claims the number of children taken by Russia is much higher. Kyiv has so far identified 19,546 children who it says were forcibly taken from Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions since 2022.
The list could be far from final, as Ukrainian officials believe that some children lost their parents during the hostilities and cannot get in touch with their relatives in Ukraine.
As of early June, only 1,345 children had returned home to Ukraine but why did Russia take them in the first place?
“The aim is genocide of the Ukrainian people through Ukrainian children,” Daria Herasymchuk, a presidential adviser on children’s rights, told media. “Everybody understands that if you take children away from a nation, the nation will not exist.”
Putin, his allies and Kremlin-backed media insist that Ukraine is an “artificial state” with no cultural and ethnic identity.
Russian officials who run orphanages, foster homes and facilitate adoptions are being accused of changing the Ukrainian children’s names to deprive them of access to relatives.
“Russians do absolutely everything to erase the children’s identity,” Herasymchuk said.
The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicizing and building cases of alleged war crimes Russia commits in Ukraine, said “indoctrination” is at play.
“The system is in the aspects of indoctrination, the re-education of children, when they are deprived of a certain identity that they had in Ukraine, and another identity, a Russian one, is imposed upon them,” Viktoria Novikova, the Reckoning Project’s senior researcher, told media.
Russia’s ultimate goal is to “turn their enemy, the Ukrainians, into their friend, so that these children think that Ukraine is an enemy so that (Russia) can seize all of Ukraine”, she said.
A group of researchers at Yale University that helps locate the children agrees that the alleged abductions “may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
Moscow conducts a “systematic campaign of forcibly moving children from Ukraine into Russia, fracturing their connection to Ukrainian language and heritage through ‘re-education’ and even disconnecting children from their Ukrainian identities through adoption,” said the Humanitarian Research Laboratory of the Yale School of Public Health.
The group has located some 8,400 children in five dozen facilities in Russia and Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally.
In 2022, Sergey Mironov, head of A Just Russia, a pro-Kremlin party, adopted a 10-month-old girl named Marharyta Prokopenko, according to the Vaznye Istorii online magazine. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
