“Three children who were under pressure and threats from the Russian military were rescued from the occupied territories of Ukraine, the head of the President’s Office, Andrii Yermak, said.”, — write: www.radiosvoboda.org
“The 17-year-old boy was taken out earlier, but his 15-year-old brother and 12-year-old sister together with their parents remained in the occupation. The Russian military threatened the family, interrogated the parents and forced the children to go to a Russian school with propaganda. But now they are finally safe in the controlled territory of Ukraine.
For almost four years, the 16-year-old boy lived under the constant surveillance of the occupation services, who came to his home and threatened the family because of the family’s refusal to attend a Russian school. In the end, our partners helped the boy to leave, and today he is with his relatives,” wrote the head of the presidential office, thanking the Ukrainian Network for the Rights of the Child for helping in the rescue.
According to official Ukrainian data, during the full-scale war in Russia and the occupied territories, more than 20,000 Ukrainian children ended up. At the same time, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, assumed that Russia had illegally removed about 150,000 children from Ukraine, while the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Darya Gerasymchuk, called the number “several hundred thousand children, i.e., about 200-300 thousand.”
Read also: The Russian Federation in the occupied territories imposes its propaganda on Ukrainian children and teaches them to fight – British intelligence
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Children’s Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of committing war crimes – forcible deportations and displacement of the population, including children, from the occupied territories of Ukraine.
In July 2023, the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, stated that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russia has “adopted” about 4.8 million residents of Ukraine, of which more than 700,000 are children. According to her, most Ukrainian children allegedly came to Russia with their parents or other relatives.