The missing children of Ukraine

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Ukrainian kids are being transferred into Russia from the territories it has occupied in East Ukraine. The Kremlin says they're saving them; Kyiv claims genocide.

14/02/2023 -Barely two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin sat in a stately Kremlin office, across from his newly-minted Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova.

First item on the agenda: the families and children evacuated from occupied east Ukraine. Lvova-Belova explained that 1090 orphans had already arrived from state care institutions in the Donbas, and that Russian citizens with “big hearts” were lining up to take them in. Minors with documents were being registered, she said, and those with Russian citizenship obtained in the Donbas were being put up for temporary guardianship.

“Why only Russian?- with any citizenship”, Putin asked, frowning. The children’s ombudswoman started to explain that there were “legislative delays”, and he quickly interrupted her: “Tell me which ones, and we will remove them”.

Almost three months later, Putin signed a law that allowed fast-tracked Russian citizenship for children from the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, but also the rest of Ukraine, facilitating the fostering of Ukrainian minors by Russian families, and paving the way for permanent adoption, in a country where adoption of foreign nationals is not allowed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova discuss "children from the Donbas" at a Kremlin meeting on 9 March 2022. Photo: Kremlin press office, video from Russian state TV RTR

Governments around the world, international NGOs and the UN have all condemned this practice. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said recently that “in a situation of war, you cannot determine if children have families or guardianship. And therefore, until that is clarified, you cannot give them another nationality or have them adopted by another family. So that’s very clear, we’ve said it, but I want to say it again, this is something that is happening in Russia and must not happen," he said in an interview with Reuters in Kyiv.

A team of journalists from several European public service media news organizations, under the umbrella of the EBU Investigative Journalism Network, have spent weeks analyzing dozens of videos from Russian official outlets, and interviewed Ukrainian authorities, families and international NGOs.

Requests for interviews sent to the office of Maria Lvova-Belova and Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of Moscow region, were left unanswered by the Russian authorities. From all the sources available it has been possible to confirm that since the start of the war at least hundreds of kids from the occupied areas of Ukraine have been taken to Russia for placement in families or state institutions, or have yet to come back from medical treatments or summer camps in Russian territory which should have ended months ago.

Lvova-Belova and the Russian authorities present these transfers of kids as a charitable effort to save them from the horrors of war, and give them a better life than they had before. Plane and trainloads of bewildered Ukrainian children can be seen paraded in propaganda videos and state TV reports as they arrive in Russian towns.

The youngsters are welcomed with gift baskets and tight hugs from adults they’ve never met in person before, prospective guardians eager to facilitate their integration into the new ‘motherland’.

“You have to see how they have changed in just a couple of months - joyful, bright, smiling!”, Lvova-Belova said at a naturalization ceremony in July where a group of children received their brand-new red Russian passports. “Now that the children have become Russian citizens, temporary guardianship can become permanent.”

MARIA LVOVA-BELOVA: The embrace of the motherland

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi during his visit to Ukraine in January. Photo: UNHCR

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi during his visit to Ukraine in January. Photo: UNHCR

Holding both Russian and Ukrainian passports is possible in Russia, as long as authorities are notified. Ukraine however is one of the few countries in the world who does not recognize dual citizenship. New legislation is being introduced in Kyiv to allow citizens from Russian-occupied areas to keep their Ukrainian nationality, since "Ukraine does not recognize the forced automatic acquisition of Russian citizenship by Ukrainians in the occupied peninsula, and this is not a reason to lose Ukrainian citizenship", according to its Foreign Ministry.

It is unclear, however, how the acquisition of Russian nationality while in Russia would impact the Ukrainian citizenship of minors like those being transferred from occupied territories.

Maria Lvova-Belova looks on as a teenager from the Donbas receives her Russian passport from the hands of Moscow Oblast governor Andrey Vorobyov at a naturalization ceremony in July 2022. Photo: Press office of the Commissioner for Children's Rights

Maria Lvova-Belova looks on as a teenager from the Donbas receives her Russian passport from the hands of Moscow Oblast governor Andrey Vorobyov at a naturalization ceremony in July 2022. Photo: Press office of the Commissioner for Children's Rights

Moscow insists that they are placing them in families until their relatives are found, but the Ukrainian government has for months denounced this as a campaign to forcibly deport thousands of minors, within the wider context of other war atrocities. “This is nothing but the genocide of the Ukrainian people through our children”, says Daria Herasymchuk, the Ukrainian government’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights and Rehabilitation. “They kidnap them, they change their citizenship, give them up for adoption under guardianship, commit sexual violence and other crimes. They kill, injure our children and inflict psychological injuries. All these are nothing but signs of genocide. Of course, the Russians don’t do this so we can quickly and easily find the children and return them to the territory of Ukraine.” Although Russia and Ukraine have been able to agree on the exchange of prisoners of war, no green corridor for the evacuation of children from battlezones has been set up so far during the conflict.

"Children of War", the website created by the Ukrainian government as a tool "for finding children, rescuing them and liberating them from places of forced displacement or deportation".

"Children of War", the website created by the Ukrainian government as a tool "for finding children, rescuing them and liberating them from places of forced displacement or deportation".

It is impossible to determine the exact number of unaccompanied minors who have so far been transferred from Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation into mainland Russia or other areas. The only official registry of missing children is the one kept by the Ukrainian government, but it also contains data of cases of children who were with their parents when they disappeared. As of early February, this website contained names, pictures and dates of birth of more than 16,000 minors. A total of 126 children have been returned to Ukraine, according to the same source, but only when parents or other adults have been able to track them down, mustering the courage and resources to enter Russia and show up on their doorstep, after a long, expensive and perilous trip across active battlefronts and several borders.

TIMELINE: THE MISSING CHILDREN OF UKRAINE

“The forcible transfer of children, as we see it, is clearly a war crime, but it's also a crime against humanity, because it is being carried out on a widespread and systematic level,” says Reed Brody, a veteran international war crimes prosecutor and member of the International Commission of Jurists. He points out that it will be a challenge for any prosecution to demonstrate intent, which is the legal threshold for genocide.”It's very difficult in international law to prove intent. But obviously, both legally, factually, emotionally, transferring children is of even greater significance because it does aim at altering the demographic, or can aim at altering the demographic makeup of a region.” The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lists "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" as one of the acts constitutive of genocide, when it is "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

Reed Brody, war crimes prosecutor, interviewed in Barcelona in January by Spanish broadcaster RTVE

Reed Brody, war crimes prosecutor, interviewed in Barcelona in January by Spanish broadcaster RTVE

Many of the minors have been taken to the Moscow region, where under the auspices of its governor Andrey Vorobyov 30 schools already offer specialized training programs for those willing to harbor children from the Donbas, offering a dedicated hotline for their questions. There is a financial compensation for each child they take in, and often these families have other biological and foster children, in line with the example set by Lvova-Belova herself, who has five biological sons and daughters, four foster children and the guardianship of 13 disabled children.

The capital has been a sort of testing ground for a wider scheme that now includes the most remote regions in the country, some as far as Siberia. “There are kids who wound up in Vladivostok who are Ukrainian”, says Bill Van Esveld, the Associate Child Rights Director at Human Rights Watch, an NGO which has been looking into the issue for months. “Russia changed its laws in May to allow these children to be given Russian nationality. And the reason they wanted that was so that these kids could then be not just put under guardianship or foster arrangements, but fully adopted by Russian families, taken into Russian families. And that's happened in hundreds of cases.”

“Children from the Donbas”, as they were described, were invited to attend a New Year event in Belarus, in the presence of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, a staunch Putin ally. And the head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov recently posted in his Telegram account that about 200 “difficult teenagers from various regions of Russia, including the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics” were staying in the region for “military-patriotic education.”

Once in the system, the children are immediately enrolled in school and the process of assimilation into Russian society begins. “It's a big question what kind of environment will be around these children. Even if we imagine that these children find some parents, some family who cares about them” says Oleksandra Romanstova, director at the Center for Civil Liberties and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Romantsova, interviewed in Kyiv in January by Belgian broadcaster RTBF.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Romantsova, interviewed in Kyiv in January by Belgian broadcaster RTBF.

“But still these parents will be inside the Russian Federation, where you don't have any protection by the law, you don't have fair trials, you don't have a balanced education system. All these children will hear that Ukraine is a fascist state. So this disconnection with Ukrainian culture, disconnection with the Ukrainian identity of these children happens. “

THE PLAYBOOK

There are three categories of children who are being taken, at times in their dozens, into the network of a Russian bureaucratic system backed by the infrastructure, money and the full support of a president at war with their homeland.

Research into Russian official social media accounts, websites and other sources showed the scale of the operation and the different types of children transferred into Russian families for fostering or adoption.

1. Children from Ukrainian state care institutions

“Welcome to Moscow! Let’s go!” Standing in the aisle of a Russian Defence Ministry plane, Lvova-Belova smiles as she motions 125 kids, reportedly from Donetsk, to disembark on a September day in the Russian capital.

Maria Lvova-Belova arriving in Moscow on a Russian Defence Ministry plane with 125 children from the DPR. Video from her Telegram channel

In her Telegram post celebrating the transfer, Lvova-Belova tells the story of Ira from Mariupol, one of the cities hit hardest by Russian attacks in the war.

Since the summer Ira has been living with a family in Ryazan, about four hours by car from Moscow, and today he is running towards his three-year-old sister, brought on the plane to be reunited with him. The other children in this, the largest group to be transferred 'in recent times' according to Lvova-Belova, will travel on in small groups to 13 different regions of the country.

This is just one example of the many propaganda videos on Telegram, YouTube and other official channels operated by Russian public bodies, illustrating a constant flow of children from Ukraine into Russia.

A simple addition of the numbers cited in these accounts shows that at least hundreds of children who were living under state guardianship in Ukrainian institutions have been taken by Lvova-Belova, some of them literally by hand, into Russian territory.

The modus operandi is simple but effective: after Russian soldiers occupy an area, a new local administration takes over the management of social services, including orphanages and boarding houses. What Lvova-Belova calls the “unified algorithm” of the many different services of the omnipotent state speeds up the process to place the children into families and give them Russian citizenship. They are entered into the Russian national databank of orphans and children without parental care.

The website usynovite.ru lists as available children from Crimea and also the 'four new regions' of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, illegally annexed by Moscow in September 2022.

A simple search for children from Crimea yields 144 results, though to date children from the newly-occupied territories are not listed on the site.

The adoption match agency calls itself an “autonomous non-profit organization” working with the support and recognition of the Russian Ministry of Education.

Before the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine had the highest rate of child institutionalization in Europe, according to data from the European Union and UNICEF analyzed by Reuters. More than 100,000 children, half of them with some degree of disability, were living part or full-time in over 700 institutions referred to as “orphanages” or “internats”. Up to 95,000 were hurriedly moved within the system or returned to parents and other legal guardians before Putin launched his “special military operation”, making it more difficult to track their whereabouts today. “There's been a lot of reports citing the number of children taken from institutions who aren't accounted for as above 2000” says Van Esveld from HRW, “Many were sent home inside Ukraine. Some were evacuated to other European countries. But how many were taken by Russia? We don't have the exact figure. This really should be a priority.”

Map of Ukrainian orphanages in areas occupied by Russian forces during the war. Source: Ukrainian broadcaster UA:PBC

Map of Ukrainian orphanages in areas occupied by Russian forces during the war. Source: Ukrainian broadcaster UA:PBC

The Ukrainian Regional Center for Human Rights, together with the US-based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, have submitted a communication before the International Criminal Court directly accusing Maria Lvova-Belova of “actions that have elements of the crime of genocide”.

One of the lawyers involved in the research and writing of the filing, Kateryna Rashevska, says they have documented at least 400 cases of the forcible transfer of children into Russian families.

“In the Tula Oblast the governor has implemented a special system of benefits for families who adopt children from the Donbas. And also in the Moscow region we have documented some cases of this special encouragement, special benefits for families who adopt children from the Donbas. They received many presents, for example a new house.”

CASE STUDY: Stas’ journey: From a Ukrainian orphanage to a Russian family.

2. Children separated from their parents during the war: injured, newly-orphaned, separated at filtration camps.

When shells started raining down in Mariupol, just under a year ago, Oleksander was hit by shrapnel under his eye as he was running to retrieve his sister from a neighbor’s house. His mother Snizhana Kozlova took him to the Ilyich Iron & Steel Works plant, to an improvised military hospital set up during the first days of the war. “The doctors washed my wound, and when our soldiers ran out of ammunition, the Russians surrounded the Ilyich factory and ordered them to surrender”, he recounted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where in January he was accompanied by the Ukrainian ombudswoman Herasymchuk, as living proof of the Russian-organized transfer of children.

“We were put on KAMAZ trucks and taken to the filtration camp (in Bezimenne). There, my mother was interrogated, and then they said that my mother did not pass the screening process and that I would be taken away from her. We were not even allowed to say goodbye.” Oleksander ended up in the Donetsk Regional Traumatology Center for medical care. “They looked at my eye there, they didn't do any surgery. And then I told the Russians that I have a grandmother, and I know her number. And they said: ‘But nobody needs you. You will have a new family.’"

Meanwhile Liudmyla Siryk, Oleksander’s grandmother, was frantically looking for news of her daughter and grandson, both disappeared from Mariupol now. She managed to get in touch thanks to a Facebook post showing Oleksander and a caption saying he was looking for his grandmother. Liudmyla asked for help from the authorities, collected documents and prepared herself for a long and dangerous journey into Donetsk. “He's mine. He's fatherless, and she (Oleksander’s mother) is gone. What could I do? I will go, I said. Under the bullets, but I will go. What can I do? He is waiting for me." After traveling through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia and the occupied Donetsk region, she found Oleksander and took him to Pryluky, in Chernihiv region, in Ukraine-controlled territory. The last information they have about the boy’s mother dates from the end of last summer, when they heard she was being kept at a facility in Taganrog. They don’t know if she is still alive today, but they still have hope. “Yes, I am waiting for my mother and I believe she will come back, and I want this to happen as soon as possible”, Oleksander says.

There are many other reports of children being separated from their parents at filtration camps, special checkpoints that the Russian military set up after occupying an area. There they scrutinize the backgrounds of the local population and send those they deem suspicious to detention centers like the infamous Olenivka prison in Donetsk, where prisoners of war and other Ukrainian citizens are alleged to have been tortured and killed.

Other adults simply die under the missile strikes, leaving their offspring behind in semi-destroyed towns circled by battlefronts and with no access to other relatives. As of early January 2023, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that almost 7000 civilians have been killed in the Ukraine war, with a further 11.000 injured.

Oleksander's mother Snezhana Photo provided by UA: PBC

Oleksander's grandmother traveled through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia and occupied Donetsk region. Google maps

Oleksander and his grandmother in Chernihiv. Photo: UA:PBC

3. Children voluntarily sent to summer camps

Natalia, one mothers in Kozacha Lopan who sent their kids to a Russian summer camp, interviewed by France Télévisions

Natalia, one mothers in Kozacha Lopan who sent their kids to a Russian summer camp, interviewed by France Télévisions

The town of Kozacha Lopan near Kharkiv, was one of the first to fall into Russian hands when the war started. After the takeover, the new Russian city council soon started promoting summer camps for youngsters in the Black Sea region. When Tatyana Glagola saw the ad in a newspaper, she thought it could be a way to get her nine-year-old daughter Polina away from the miseries of war and the constant shelling. “On our street a woman died, and also a child. We thought we were doing the right thing”, she said. “We accepted (the offer) so our daughter could be safe”.

Natalia's daughter Karina. Photo: Family photo

Natalia's daughter Karina. Photo: Family photo

At the end of August Polina, together with her neighbour Karina, and 12 other kids from the town, boarded a bus for the summer camp, which was scheduled to end in mid-September. The parents of both girls say they were asked to provide the original birth certificates of the children and were never given the exact address of the camp, or even a phone number. When Ukrainian forces took back the town in September, the border with Russia closed and their daughters didn’t return by the date they were supposed to. “I know they give papers to Ukrainian families so they can stay in Russia”, Natalia, the mother of Karina, was scared to go after her. “They tell them that Ukraine doesn’t want them anymore, they offer them accommodation. If I go I know I won’t be able to return with my daughter,” she said.

Human Rights Watch Associate Child Rights Director Bill Van Esveld heard stories like this about dozens of children when he was investigating in Kharkiv. Parents who sent their sons and daughters away thinking it would be a temporary reprieve from the bombings.

“In the meantime, Ukraine launches its successful counter offensive that liberates all those areas where the kids came from, and now the Russian authorities are saying the kids can't come back. Why can't those kids come back? Why can't you send those kids back to the Ukrainian authorities?”

"Day after tomorrow" camp in the Black Sea, for "teenagers from Donbass, who lived under shelling for years, and their peers from the liberated territories, who were not allowed to read our books and watch our films". August 2022. Video: Telegram channel Maria Lvova-Belova

Natalia, Karina and other children from Kozacha Lopan eventually made it back to their families, but others around the country are still unaccounted for. Thanks to the mediation of Ukrainian and international NGOs, and a network of volunteers and donors, after a long process and a dangerous journey some children have been released by the Russian authorities back into the custody of their Ukrainian parents, as long as they were able to pick them up in person, inside Russian territory. These releases took complex and discreet negotiations involving both sides.

“It’s not systematic, it's not public. It's impossible to speak about that publicly”, says Nobel Peace Prize Romantsova.

“It is mostly a humanitarian question. We have groups with lawyers who openly support us in the question of prisoners, they do that openly. But there are also a lot of ordinary people who want to support, they understand that the Russian Federation will punish them for that. So that's why they never do that openly. It’s not an official NGO or something like that. It's impossible to exist in the form of an official NGO who does something like this."

CASE STUDY: The empty orphanages of Kherson

In recent weeks the machinery of international justice is just starting to catch up with the case of these young Ukrainians transported into Russia. “There has never in history been as massive a legal response to criminal activity, international criminal activity as we're seeing today in Ukraine”, says Reed Brody, citing the many open proceedings.

“The Ukrainian justice system has opened tens of thousands of war crimes cases. The International Criminal Court has started what it says is its largest investigation ever into crimes in Ukraine. There are also at least 14 other countries that have opened investigations based either on universal jurisdiction or because their citizens were allegedly victimized in Ukraine. We have countries all over the world that are sending legal experts to Ukraine, so there's no lack of investigation, there's no lack of jurisdiction for crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine.” And the target of some of those cases, are the two masterminds behind the systematic deportation of minors from Ukraine; Putin and his children’s ombudswoman. ”Any prosecution related to the forced transfer of children would not be against the employees of a children’s asylum. They would be against the architects of this policy. People like Maria Lvova-Belova, perhaps, at least under the theory of command responsibility. Somebody like Vladimir Putin himself.”

In the meantime, and with war still raging on the ground, the Ukrainian authorities are asking international organizations and foreign governments to help negotiate the return of their missing children. “Without the mediation of a third country or a relevant structure such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or perhaps relevant structures of the European Union or the UN, it will be much more difficult to achieve results”, says the Ukrainian ombudswoman Herasymchuk. “We call on the entire world community to join our struggle for each of our babies, for each of our children, for each of our teenagers, since they are the future of every country, including Ukraine.”

UPDATE 17 March 2023

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Marie Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights on 17 March 2023.

In a statement, the ICC said the ICC said Putin and Lvova-Belova are allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawfully deporting children, from Ukraine to Russia.

"There are reasonable grounds to believe President Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for such deportations", the statement says, adding the deportations are alleged to have taken place since he launched the full- scale invasion of Ukraine last February. The same allegations are made about Maria Lvova-Belova.