Tracking them is essential to the hope of ending this war crime. So it’s essential that the Senate pass the Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by two Midwestern senators — Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican — that would, among other provisions, “increase support for Ukraine’s efforts to investigate and track the nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children who have been abducted during Putin’s brutal invasion, assist with the rehabilitation and reintegration of children who are returned, and provide justice and accountability for perpetrators of these abductions.”
The “mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children is an atrocity, and we really can’t be in a world where kids can be abducted during wartime and then they use it as hostage-taking,” Klobuchar said in an interview.
Kidnapping kids only adds to the tragic impact on childhood in Ukraine, said Toby Fricker, UNICEF Ukraine’s chief of advocacy and communication.
Speaking from besieged Kyiv, Fricker said that “every part of their childhood has been impacted by the war, from losing friends, from youth losing relatives. We did a survey that showed one in five had lost a family member or close friend during the war.” That “sense of security, stability, is just not there, and children are really longing for that peace. And let’s not forget that children in the east of the country have lived through 11 years of war since 2014.”
But beyond the annexed Ukrainian regions, Fricker said that “there is nowhere fully safe in Ukraine today.”
Including Rivne, in central Ukraine, home to Svitlana Zasiekina, her husband and three daughters aged 12, 10 and 7. While Rivne isn’t on the front line or front pages, it’s been attacked, said Zasiekina, who described air-raid alarms sending schoolchildren and university students, including the ones she teaches, to bomb shelters.