What are the possible situations in which Ukrainian children are abducted in Russia?

Russia has long had a strategy of abducting children from Ukraine, changing their citizenship and giving them up for adoption in the Russian Federation. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russia has taken thousands of children from the occupied Ukrainian territories to the Russian Federation. “Deutsche Welle” spoke to Darya Gerasimchuk – Ukraine’s ombudsman for children’s rights. She tells what methods the Russians use to kidnap Ukrainian children and what are the ways to get them back to Ukraine.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia, Maria Lvova-Belova, on suspicion of kidnapping Ukrainian children. Do you think they are the only ones to blame? Can anyone else be charged with these crimes?

More people relate to it. In particular, the representatives of local authorities in the various regions of Russia where these children are accepted. All evidence collected by us has been submitted to the ICC. So I think the list of suspects will expand. The arrest warrants for Putin and Belova are historic and a right step in the direction of recognizing the genocide being perpetrated against the Ukrainian people through the abduction of children.

According to the 1948 Convention for the Prevention of Genocide, the forcible transfer of children from one ethnic group to another with the aim of destroying a national, ethnic or racial group is classified as “genocide”.

Are you saying that Russia is kidnapping Ukrainian children that it wants to raise with a Russian self-awareness?

Yes, the Russians want to fill the “gaps” in their nation with Ukrainian children. All their actions indicate that there are no plans to return these children to Ukraine. Under an accelerated procedure, their citizenship was changed and they were offered free education. In addition, the Russians select children when they conduct medical examinations, where they divide them into categories. In other words, they want to select the fittest and replenish their nation at the expense of the Ukrainian one.

Were these actions of Russia planned or are they acting according to the situation?

When invading Ukraine, Russia already had a clear plan of what it was going to do with Ukrainian children. Its implementation began in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea. The Russians change the citizenship of the children and have the so-called “Train of hope”, with which Russian citizens go to Crimea, where they illegally adopt children. Russia now has at least five child abduction scenarios. We came to this conclusion after analyzing information from 308 children whose parents managed to return their children to the territories controlled by Ukraine.

What are the scenarios?

In the first scenario, the Russians remove the children from their families through the so-called filtration selection. Parents are unjustifiably detained and children are simply taken from them. In the second scenario, the Russians kill the parents and then take the children. In the third – children are taken directly from the family – sometimes by taking away parental rights. Usually this is done with “inconvenient parents” who do not want to cooperate with the occupation authorities.

The fourth scenario is when the Russians do not allow us to take children from institutional care homes in the occupied territories. At no time has Russia agreed to humanitarian corridors for the removal of these children. Instead, they are kidnapped. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, children have been abducted from four institutions, but we managed to return those to two of them.

The last, fifth, scenario is the most common. Initially, the Russians created unsuitable living conditions for the children in the occupied territories. And then they offer the parents to send their child to a camp in Russia. The children do not return from this camp, but are moved to another place without the consent of the parents. Some of the children we were able to bring back had been in such camps for over a year.

And how do you manage to get the children back? How do you act in such cases?

To find and return a child, you need to know who to look for. That is why the unified state platform “Children of the War” was created, which contains up-to-date information and personal data about children who suffered in the war. This is important because the Russians are hiding our children: moving them, trying to change their names, etc.

Therefore, the search procedure is very difficult, especially for small children who do not remember where they are from. A very important point is whether the wanted child has relatives in the territory controlled by Ukraine, who can organize guardianship and go to collect the child with the support of the state.

What is the current data on abducted children?

All data is updated every morning on the “Children of War” portal. To date, the number of deported and forcibly displaced children is 1,626. This is a named list compiled on the basis of information from parents, relatives, local authorities or witnesses.

But part of the territory of Ukraine is occupied and we have no access to it. So it could be several hundred thousand abducted children. Russian authorities are talking in the media about the so-called “evacuation” of 744,000 Ukrainian children. But this figure is not supported by any lists or personal data, so we consider it unreliable.

Russia’s representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said recently that in removing the children from Ukraine, Russian authorities wanted to “protect them from the danger associated with hostilities” and that the Russian Federation is ready to return them to Ukraine when it is safe there. . How do you explain this statement?

This is another confirmation of the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia. If this was indeed an evacuation, the children should have been returned immediately to Ukrainian-controlled territory or to third countries.