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Since the beginning of the war, the Russian authorities have transferred to his country tens of thousands of children Ukrainians to give them up for adoption to Russian families and make them their citizens. So I report the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in August based on a Kremlin report indicating that they had been forcibly mobilized to more than 1,000 Ukrainian minors. Likewise, the United Nations issued a statement in September where it claimed to have “credible accusations“of those mass deportations.
Far from denying it, the Russian representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Gennady Gatilovassured last week that Russia had received “children of war” that “they had lost their parents or were in a serious situation” with the objective to “take care of them”. He denied, yes, that they were “kidnappings”.
However, what Moscow considers an act of “humanity” is actually a potential war crime, according to international humanitarian lawwhich explicitly prohibits “deportation within an occupied territory or from an occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power”.
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This is not the first time that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of using children as spoils of war. But now, two investigations, one of Associated Press (AP) and another of New York Timesconfirm, through multiple interviews and testimonies, how the Kremlin has launched express adoption processes for minors deported by force.
The investigations focus in Mariupol, the Ukrainian city that was besieged and captured in the spring by Russian forces. With the bombing, thousands of children who were in orphanages or residences fled west to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Many, however, were intercepted at the borders and carried on buses to occupied territory.
A boy evacuated from the Russian-controlled city of Kherson looks on a bus heading to Crimea,
It is the case of Anya, 14 years oldwho managed to escape from a hospital for tuberculosis patients and now lives with a foster family in Moscow, the Times. “I didn’t want to go, but nobody asked me”, he explains to the American newspaper. In his flight, he adds, he left behind a notebook containing his mother’s phone number, of which he only remembers the first few digits.
Like her, many minors were separated from their relatives and their whereabouts remain unknown. Although the exact number is unknown, in August the kyiv government put the number of deported infants at 7,297. Some succumbed to the deceptions of russian troopswhich according to APThey were assured that their parents did not love them. Others, on the other hand, were directly taken from orphanages and residences for minors.
In August, the Ukrainian authorities estimated that 7,297 children were forcibly deported to Russia
And that is precisely what Putin is using to justify. For months, the Kremlin media has spoken of Ukrainian children as “orphans“from conflict zones who have been taken in. The problem is that many of those who come to these hospices are not orphans at all.
As the news agency recalls, the Ukrainian government recognized before the UN before the war that most of the state’s children “are not orphans, they do not have any disease or serious illness and are in an institution because their families are in difficult circumstances“.
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change of laws
In principle, Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreigners. However, in May Putin signed two decrees to simplify the process of granting Russian citizenship to Ukrainian citizens and the adoption of minors from abroad. It is a regulation thatfurther complicates your return to Ukraine and facilitates the process of forced assimilation of Ukrainian children,” according to in a resolution the European Parliament.
Behind the mass deportations is Alexeyevna Lvova-Belova, the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. According to a report from the United States Treasury Department, her tasks include managing the forced adoption of Ukrainians into Russian families and the “patriotic education” .
Maria Lvova-Belova and Vladimir Putin.
Lova-Belova, sanctioned by the US and other Western countries, assured AP that its goal was “to help children preserve their right to live under a peaceful sky and be happy.” In the summer, the official explained that 120 families had applied to adopt and more than 130 young Ukrainians had received new citizenship. The number, however, has not stopped increasing.
“Vacation” in Russia
A few weeks ago, the pro-Russian authorities in the Kherson region called on the civilian population to leave the area “imminently” at the risk of fighting due to the Ukrainian advance. Since then they cross daily the dnipro river thousands of people, children included.
Putin signed a decree in May to facilitate the adoption of Ukrainian minors
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said last Thursday that “several thousand” of minors from the Kherson region, were already “resting in houses and camps” in Russia. Following the same narrative, the governor of the area, Vladimir Saldo, wrote on his Telegram channel that it was offered to the citizens of Kherson “holidays for children and parents” in other places in the Russian Federation, such as Crimea.
These “holidays” have been rated by many international organizations as “mass deportations” that are aimed at changing the demography of Ukraine. In this regard, the ISW recalls in its war report that the forced transfer of children from one group to another “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide.
