It’s not the first time such news has come out of the hell of war in Ukraine. News that tells us there are no limits to the sacrifice of the innocent in the name of a higher imperative: military victory, ethnic and cultural supremacy. Thousands of Ukrainian children were reportedly deported by the Russians and subjected to forced adoption. The sources are Western and Ukrainian. Moscow rejects the allegations of “deportation,” but indirectly confirms the phenomenon.
“Russia doesn’t just kill or hurt our children. He’s taking them to deport them,” said Daria Gerasymchuk, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s adviser on children’s rights. For its part, Russia prides itself on helping war orphans. According to the Russian news agency Tass, the governor of the Tula region, where many Ukrainian children are housed, even spoke of a “sacred duty” in July. According to Conflict Watch, a research group supported by the US State Department, the Russian government has created a network of at least 43 closed camps where more than 6,000 Ukrainian minors are being subjected to pro-Russian indoctrination programs.
A team of researchers from Yale University, using various sources, has reconstructed the path of these children, who are scattered throughout the Russian Federation to the Far East. The report, published by Le Monde, looks at the reports and allegations made by various NGOs. In November 2022, Amnesty International denounced the “forced transfer by the Russian authorities of civilians from the occupied territories of Ukraine”. The Geneva Convention provides specific guidelines for the treatment of children separated from their family members during a conflict. Family members must be able to communicate with each other, separated children must be identified, and their temporary evacuation must be in a neutral state with parental consent.
The Yale report shows that the deportation of Ukrainian minors to Russia began just days before Russian troops invaded the area. «In early February 2022, a group of five hundred orphans were evacuated to Russia from the Donetsk region. The alleged threat of a Ukrainian offensive was given as the reason at the time,” the document says. Some of these Ukrainian children have since been adopted by Russian families. The Russian authorities have made no secret of their program, presented as a “humanitarian action” aimed at “orphans abandoned and traumatized by war”.
«In May 2022 – Le Monde recalls – Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree facilitating the adoption of Ukrainian children, which was almost impossible before the conflict broke out. An unprecedented financial assistance program has been created for adoptive families. Russia has been plagued by a severe demographic crisis for several decades, and the birth rate fell sharply by 6.2% in 2022.
According to Yale researchers, the program will be orchestrated at the head of the Russian state by Sergei Kirienko, deputy head of the presidential administration, Tatyana Moskalkova, commissioner for human rights, and Maria Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights. Lvova-Belova, a mother with a large family who presents herself as a devout Orthodox (with Vladimir Putin pictured below, posted by Sputnik), appears on Russian television to praise the “rescue” of Ukrainian children. On September 28, according to France Info, he said he had “taught to love Russia” thirty children who were “hidden in the basements of Mariupol,” a city destroyed by the Russian army in the spring of 2022. According to France Info, the NGO Magnolia has already received more than 2,600 requests for assistance for missing children. So far, according to the Ukrainian authorities, only 125 displaced minors have been able to return to their country.
There is conflicting data. In mid-November, Moscow announced that, according to the Russian news agency Interfax, more than 4.7 million refugees, including about 712,000 children, had arrived on its territory since the beginning of the war. According to Interfax, in the spring Ukraine spoke of 240,000 minors who were deported to Russia. The National Information Bureau of Ukraine (NIB) lists nearly 14,000 deported minors for which it has data confirmed by the Prosecutor General’s team or the Interior Ministry. About 38,000 cases of people deprived of parental rights by special commissions were listed in a report prepared by several Ukrainian organizations.
Aaron Greenberg, UNICEF’s adviser on child protection in Europe, said: “Adoption should never take place during a humanitarian crisis.” Russia, on the other hand, wants to intensify and speed up these processes. For many Ukrainians, these transfers have a face, that of Maria Lvova-Belova. Since March, following a meeting with Vladimir Putin, he has been working to promote the adoption of Ukrainians. He even took into custody a 16-year-old survivor of the Mariupol bombing, Amnesty International reported in November. The law prohibits Russians from adopting foreign children. To solve this problem, Vladimir Putin signed a decree providing for a simplified naturalization procedure for orphans and children without parental care.
This hasty naturalization policy is one of the tools Russia is using in its “coordinated absorption effort.” [questi minori] in Russian society,” denounces Amnesty International. “These minors were taken to at least 57 regions of Russia,” said Ukrainian lawyer Ekaterina Rashevskaya. Adoptive parents are required to undergo proper education, and about thirty specialized schools have been opened in the Moscow region, according to the BBC’s Russian service, which interviewed a resident of Lukhovitsy near the capital. His family took in a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. Adoptive parents receive a subsidy. For example, on the official portal of the city of Krasnodar it says: “In the case of simultaneous adoption of a disabled child, a child over 7 years old or siblings, the allowance is paid in the amount of 156,428.66 rubles” , or almost 2,000 euros.
Emmanuel Daoud, a French lawyer, has asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an investigation into the genocide and issue arrest warrants. The French lawyer bases his argument on the scale and the systematic and planned nature of these transfers, sometimes overseen by the Russian army, and forced adoptions, which demonstrate a conscious will to destroy (totally or partially) a national group. “It is a matter of ‘de-Ukrainization’ and ‘Russification’ of children,” says the document sent to the CPI, which france.info was able to consult.
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