UNITED NATIONS — Ukraine demanded Wednesday that Russia end what Kyiv called “the largest kidnapping campaign in modern history” and return Ukrainian children forcibly transferred from its territory during the ongoing war.
“Ukraine is searching for nearly 20,000 children who were subjected to illegal deportation and forced transfer,” said Daria Zarivna, an adviser to Ukraine’s president and a senior official at his Bring Kids Back Ukraine initiative.
“Yet the actual figure could be much higher, but we can’t find it out — Russian officials systematically refuse to provide information,” Zarivna added.
Zarivna told a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, convened to discuss the situation, that so far 1,022 children have been repatriated, and she urged the international community to pressure Moscow to cooperate.
“Russia must be forced to meet its obligations under international law,” Zarivna said. “It must be compelled to allow access to occupied territories, stop deportations and forced citizenship and political indoctrination of children, provide information about transferred kids, [and] cooperate to bring them home.”
Russia denies it has forcibly transferred children.
“There is no program in Russia on adopting children from the area of the special military operation,” Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said, using the Kremlin term for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Those who are orphans or those who are without relatives were only transferred onto temporary preliminary guardianship or temporary wardship, with Russian citizens,” he said. “Nor is there any basis for the allegation about the forced naturalization of Ukrainian children.”
He said a decree streamlining citizenship simply provides “an opportunity to obtain Russian citizenship for humanitarian reasons” and does not require an individual to give up their Ukrainian citizenship.
But the International Criminal Court disagrees. In March 2023, the court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian commissioner for children’s rights.
The ICC pretrial chamber said it “considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”
“We call on member states to execute these warrants and ensure accountability,” Ukraine’s Zarivna said.
In June 2023, the U.N. secretary-general added Russia to its blacklist of perpetrators of grave violations against children for Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, including the killing and maiming of children and attacks on schools.
US to sanction abusers
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, announced that the Biden administration is pursuing visa restrictions for five Russian officials and authorities backed or installed by Russia, for their involvement in human rights abuses in Ukraine, including the forced deportation, transfer, and confinement of Ukrainian children.
“Make no mistake: Russian officials and Russian forces have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity,” she said, chastising Moscow for being “intransigent and unrepentant, frustrating international efforts” to identify, locate, and reunite missing children with their families.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab, presented his group’s findings that at least 314 Ukrainian children have been placed in the Kremlin’s “program of coerced adoption and fostering” since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He said 67 of the children have been formally naturalized as Russian citizens, while 208 have been placed with Russian families through adoption or some form of permanent or temporary guardianship.
“The children the Humanitarian Research Laboratory could find were exclusively, we believe, from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, but information reviewed by HRL analysts indicates children from Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Kharkiv oblasts as well — areas captured by Russia after February 2022 — are likely included in the program as well,” Raymond said.
He said that the full number of children from Ukraine that Russia has placed in its adoption and fostering program is not known and his team could not determine it from the data they analyzed.
“Russia must provide Ukraine, the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF, and other relevant authorities a full list of the children it has taken, including those in the database systems that we have reviewed,” Raymond said.
“Until Russia gives up this information, which it is legally and morally required to do, it will be impossible to fully assess how many children exactly from Ukraine are waiting to go home.”
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