Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been forcefully deported by Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and until now, Kyiv has managed to bring back only about 1,000 of them, Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets told Euronews.

Moscow started its deportation campaign when it first invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Kyiv’s first recorded case of a Ukrainian child being forcefully taken to Russia was registered in annexed Crimea. Ten years later, the deportations continue in every part of Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. 

Kyiv’s main problem is verifying the information the authorities receive, the Ukrainian ombudsman said.

“The Russian Federation never gave us any information about Ukrainian children. I tried to use international organisations. I sent loads of applications and letters to all United Nations organisations, to the International Committee of Red Cross to try to find information about Ukrainian children without any success,” Lubinets explained. 

So far, Ukraine has managed to find solid information on these 19,546 children to confirm that they have indeed been forcefully deported to Russia.

“The list consists of orphans, children without parents, children with relatives and parents in Ukrainian side,” Lubinets illustrated.

What happens to Ukrainian children after they’re taken to Russia?

Once Ukrainian children are deported to Russia, local authorities try to erase any of their connection to their homeland. The children are being “brainwashed,” he said, and their official documents are being altered so that their relatives couldn’t find and bring them back home.

“Passports, birth certificates, all the information is also changed into ‘Russia’,” Lubinets explained.

And that’s when the militarisation begins. “All the Ukrainian children must be a member of youth military organisations of the Russian Federation, even girls, you know,” he added.

“We see (in that) all the details of colonial policy of Russian Federation against Ukraine. And I really believe that the main goal for Russians for the deportation of Ukrainian children is to raise a new generation of the Russian army.”

Putin facing ICC trial

The deportation has to be interpreted through the context of a war crime first and foremost, Lubinets explained.

“It means that Russian Federation occupied Ukrainian territory, took Ukrainian children on Ukrainian territory and released these children to Russian territory.” 

And in this regard, Moscow’s deportation campaign, he said, qualifies as genocide. “Genocide has five elements as a war crime. One element is forcibly transferring children from one ethnic group to another. This is the real genocide.”

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the unlawful deportation of children and the unlawful transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. The US, EU, and UK have all sanctioned Lvova-Belova for her alleged role in the scheme.

Moscow denies all the accusations that the children were moved by force. 

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Lvova-Belova herself said that she “adopted” a teenage boy from Mariupol, a Ukrainian city destroyed and captured by Russia in the spring of 2022. 

Lubinets says Kyiv has information that this is not the only case, and other “heads of state authorities of the Russian Federation participated in this.” 

And while Kyiv authorities say they have information about just thousands of Ukrainian children deported to Russia, Lvova-Belova revealed in July of last year that around 700,000 Ukrainian minors have been “transferred” to Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. 

Lubinets warns there could be even more children in danger: “Now that more than 20% of Ukrainian territory is under Russian occupation, 1.5 million of Ukrainian children live on that territory. And the Russian Federation can deport all these children to the Russian side.” 

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When asked what Kyiv can do to prevent it, he said there is only one way.

“We need to liberate the whole territory of Ukraine,” Lubinets said.

“Only then could Ukraine establish a new mechanism of receiving information about the deported children, and that is when the actual number will be revealed, and it will be significantly higher.”