The Guardian reports that according to Yale University estimates, about 35,000 Ukrainian children are reported missing or are believed to be held by Russians. The university team thoroughly examined Russian databases, official documents, and even satellite images of Russian facilities, official buildings, and other sources and found that some of them were transferred to military camps, while others ended up in orphanages or were adopted.
Families claim they are forced to take desperate and risky measures to try to save them. When Russian troops began their invasion in February 2022, children were abducted from orphanages, battlefields after their parents were killed, or forcibly taken directly from their families.
Russia has rejected demands to return the children, and one official accused Ukraine of "staging a show about missing children" during ceasefire talks in Turkey this month.
Returning abducted children is extremely difficult, so desperate parents travel to Russia themselves to search for them. The publication told the story of one such mother, Natalia from Kherson, who spent six days on the road to finally retrieve her sons, who were held by Russians in a camp in Anapa. However, her story is reportedly a rare happy exception.
According to the Ukrainian organization "Return the Children," only 1,366 children have been returned or escaped back to Ukraine so far.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab, believes that "this is probably the largest child abduction since World War II — comparable to the Germanization of Polish children by the Nazis."
Testimonies from recently rescued children show that they underwent military training in camps and were punished for speaking Ukrainian. They are also made to believe that their parents will be punished if they do not comply, said Daria Kasyanova, chair of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network. She noted that she witnessed similar abductions and deportations during Russia's invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
The International Criminal Court in March 2023 issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for "war crimes" in the form of the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children.
The return of the children remains a key demand of Ukraine in any peace negotiations. Meanwhile, Raymond notes that children are being used as bargaining chips in negotiations: "When the Russians started, they thought they would quickly win, so this program was launched not to take these children and hold them, but to Russify Ukraine. But as things quickly went awry, they had to move from the phase of concealing responsibility to using these children as hostages that could be used in negotiations."
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