{"id":172825,"date":"2025-06-10T11:34:13","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T11:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/172825\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T11:34:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T11:34:13","slug":"ukraine-says-russia-took-20000-children-during-war-will-some-be-returned-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/172825\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine says Russia took 20,000 children during war. Will some be returned? | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> Russian President Vladimir Putin faces criminal charges for the \u201cunlawful deportation and transfer of children\u201d.<\/p>\n

That is the definition of the 2023 arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, the intergovernmental tribunal based in The Hague.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The return of these children \u201ccould become the first test of the sincerity of [Russia\u2019s] intentions\u201d to reach a peace settlement, Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s chief of staff, told media. \u201cThe ball is in Russia\u2019s corner.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As of early June, only 1,345 children had returned home to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

But why did Russia take them in the first place?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe aim is genocide of the Ukrainian people through Ukrainian children,\u201d Daria Herasymchuk, a presidential adviser on children\u2019s rights, told Al Jazeera. \u201cEverybody understands that if you take children away from a nation, the nation will not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putin, his allies and Kremlin-backed media insist that Ukraine is an \u201cartificial state\u201d with no cultural and ethnic identity.<\/p>\n

Russian officials who run orphanages, foster homes and facilitate adoptions are being accused of changing the Ukrainian children\u2019s names to deprive them of access to relatives.<\/p>\n

\u201cRussians do absolutely everything to erase the children\u2019s identity,\u201d Herasymchuk said.<\/p>\n

The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicising and building cases of alleged war crimes Russia commits in Ukraine, said \u201cindoctrination\u201d is at play.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Viktoria Novikova, the Reckoning Project\u2019s senior researcher, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s ultimate goal is to \u201cturn 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\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n

A group of researchers at Yale University that helps locate the children agrees that the alleged abductions \u201cmay constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Moscow conducts a \u201csystematic campaign of forcibly moving children from Ukraine into Russia, fracturing their connection to Ukrainian language and heritage through \u2018re-education\u2019, and even disconnecting children from their Ukrainian identities through adoption,\u201d said the Humanitarian Research Laboratory of the Yale School of Public Health.<\/p>\n

The group has located some 8,400 children in five dozen facilities in Russia and Belarus, Moscow\u2019s closest ally.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The girl was taken from an orphanage in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson that was occupied at the time. Her name was changed to Marina Mironova, the magazine reported.<\/p>\n

The girl\u2019s name is on the June 2 list.<\/p>\n

The alleged abductions are far from \u201cchaotic\u201d and follow detailed scenarios, Herasymchuk said.<\/p>\n

She said some children are taken from parents who refuse to collaborate with Moscow-installed \u201cadministrations\u201d in Russia-occupied areas.<\/p>\n

During this \u201cfiltration\u201d procedure, she alleged that Russian intelligence and military officers and Ukrainian collaborators interrogate and \u201ctorture\u201d the parents, checking their bodies for pro-Ukrainian tattoos or bruises left by recoiling firearms.<\/p>\n

Viktoria Obidina, a 29-year-old military nurse taken prisoner after failing a \u201cfiltration\u201d that followed the 2022 siege of the southern city of Mariupol, feared such an abduction.<\/p>\n

She also thought that her daughter Alisa, who was four at the time, would witness her torture and then end up in a Russian orphanage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey could have tortured me near her or could have tortured her to make me do things,\u201d Obidina told<\/a> Al Jazeera after her release from Russian captivity in September 2022.<\/p>\n

Instead, she opted to hand Alisa to a complete stranger, a civilian woman who had already undergone the \u201cfiltration\u201d process and boarded a bus that took 10 days of endless stops and checks amid shelling and shooting to reach a Kyiv-controlled area.<\/p>\n

Another alleged method is \u201csummer camping\u201d, in which children in Russia-occupied areas are taken to Crimea or Russian cities along the Black Sea coast and are not returned to their parents, Herasymchuk claimed.<\/p>\n

Some parents plunge into the abyss of trying to reach Russia to get their kids back.<\/p>\n

But very few succeed, as Ukrainians trying to enter Russia are often barred from re-entry.<\/p>\n

Attempts to return a child are \u201calways a lottery\u201d, Herasymchuk said.<\/p>\n

Children of preschool age often do not remember their addresses and do not know how to reach out to their relatives, while teenagers are more inventive, she said.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian boys are especially vulnerable as they are seen as future soldiers who could fight against Ukraine, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the boys undergo militarisation, they get summons from Russian conscription offices so that they become Russian soldiers and return to Ukraine,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A return is often more feasible through a third nation such as Qatar<\/a>, whose government has helped get dozens of children back home.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Russia\u2019s children\u2019s rights ombudswoman said she had received the list of 339 Ukrainian children. She denied that Russia had abducted tens of thousands of children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see that there aren\u2019t 20,000-25,000 children; the list contains only 339 [names], and we will work thoroughly on each child,\u201d Maria Lvova-Belova told the Tass news agency.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Lvova-Belova adopted a 15-year-old boy from Ukraine\u2019s Mariupol.<\/p>\n

Along with Putin, she is wanted<\/a> by the International Criminal Court for her role in the alleged abductions.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian observers hope that the children\u2019s return may be one of the few positive things to come out of the stalled Ukraine-Russia peace talks, which were last held in Turkiye\u2019s Istanbul.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce everyone understands that no ceasefire is discussed in Istanbul, the Ukrainian side is trying to squeeze things out maximally out of the humanitarian track,\u201d Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin faces criminal charges for the \u201cunlawful deportation and transfer of children\u201d.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[299,12,332,7661,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-172825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-europe","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-russia","11":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","12":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114658860541619011","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}