UN says: Russia's deportation of Ukrainian children amounts to crime against humanity.

The deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia constitutes a crime against humanity and a war crime, the UN has said. A new report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine says Russian authorities "at the highest level" have deported "thousands" of children from the occupied areas of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's "direct involvement" has been "visible from the outset," it adds. Ukraine says almost 20,000 children have been illegally sent to Russia and Belarus.

 

The UN Commission has so far identified 1,205 cases of children who were taken from Ukrainian territories by Moscow in 2022. Eighty percent of these children have not yet been returned, the report says, and many parents and guardians are to this day unaware of the whereabouts of the minors. This amounts to enforced disappearance and unjustifiable delay in repatriation, which are crimes against humanity and war crimes respectively, according to the UN. The majority of the children mentioned in the UN report lived in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics - Ukrainian regions which Moscow illegally claims control over.

 

The report says that just before it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow evacuated these children to the Russian Federation, claiming they were at risk of an imminent attack by Ukraine. Then, the children were placed in families or institutions and given Russian citizenship. Moscow has always dismissed accusations of forcibly removing children from Ukrainian territory. Vladimir Putin once said that "the story of the 'child abductions'... [was] exaggerated" and insisted that the children in question had been "rescued" from a war zone. At the time, he also insisted there was "no problem" returning the children to their homeland.

 

But Kyiv has always argued that it was not the case, and the UN report says that children have faced huge difficulties travelling back to Ukraine. This forced removal and severed ties with their homeland, combined with a "coercive environment" in Russia, "has been a source of deep distress for the children", according to the UN. The children who manage to return suffer from "trauma, anxiety and fear of abandonment", the report says, often due to harsh treatment in Russia. One child was told by staff in a Russian orphanage that his country, Ukraine, "does not exist anymore, everything has burnt down, and your parents have probably died".

"I am still looking for my daughter, and I am terribly afraid of what she might think of me and how she survives [in Russia], where many people hate Ukrainians," the report quotes a mother who has been unable to track down her child as saying.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin, accusing him and his commissioner for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, of the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children.

 

Lvova-Belova gave an interview in which she described "taking in" a 15-year-old boy from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which Russia currently occupies, and "re-educating" him despite the fact he "did not want to go" to Russia. Ukraine says it has so far recovered 2,000 children. US First Lady Melania Trump has reportedly been involved in facilitating the reunification of children. Last year, she said she had an "open channel of communication" with Putin after he responded to her letter of concern about the child victims of the Russia-Ukraine war.

 

The war in Ukraine continues unabated despite several rounds of talks involving Moscow and Kyiv's negotiating teams and, most recently, an American delegation. The conflict - now in its fifth year - has killed more than 15,000 civilians, injured more than 41,300, and displaced 3.7 million.

 Credit to BBC