“The ombudsman emphasized that Russia forcibly relocated a total of 19,546 children, while suggesting that the true number is much higher and that it will continue to rise”, — write: www.radiosvoboda.org
“First of all, we are helped by our international partners. I am very pleased that the main partner in the matter of returning Ukrainian children is Qatar… They help us a lot. As a result, you can see that we have a constantly increasing number of Ukrainian children whom we returned from the Russian Federation, as well as from the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine,” said Dmytro Lubinets.
The ombudsman emphasized that Russia had forcibly relocated a total of 19,546 children, suggesting at the same time that the true number was much higher and that it would continue to rise.
“They do not provide any information about Ukrainian children. One and a half million Ukrainian children live in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine. How many of them have the Russians already deported? We can only guess… Aleya is convinced that the number of children deported by the Russian Federation will grow,” noted Lubinets.
The Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights also added that Russia is “dragging out” the process of returning Ukrainian children as much as possible.
“Even when we submit documents through partners, we establish on our own where Ukrainian children are and under what conditions. We are preparing a package of documents for partners, where we show that this is a Ukrainian child. There are relatives and friends in Ukraine, and we want to return this child. A constant problem, as I said, is the reluctance of the Russian Federation to quickly return Ukrainian children,” the Ombudsman said.
In the European Parliament, at a conference dedicated to the return of Ukrainian children home, Lubinets called on the international community to create a permanent body on the return of Ukrainian children, join a coalition of countries working on this, collect information on forcibly displaced children, develop programs for their rehabilitation and work on attracting the guilty to responsibility.
According to official Ukrainian data, more than 20,000 Ukrainian children ended up in Russia and the occupied territories during the war. Dmytro Lubinets, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, assumed that in total, Russia illegally removed about 150,000 children from Ukraine. Darya Gerasimchuk, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Children’s Rights, calls the number “several hundred thousand children, that is, somewhere between 200-300 thousand.”
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of committing war crimes – forcible deportations and displacement of the population, including children, from the occupied territories of Ukraine.