Russian authorities use Crimea as a place to filter Ukrainian children – Lubinets

For Ukrainian children who were deported by Russia, occupied Crimea and its network of alleged health camps have become a place where their future is determined, Dmytro Lubinets, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights of Ukraine, said in an interview with the RFE/RL project.

According to him, children in Crimea are “brainwashed” by Russian propaganda and tested for loyalty, after which they decide to deport them or give them up for adoption to Russian families.

“They built logistics there, that is, they created a system of camps. In fact, there were children’s camps there, but now the Russians use them in a different way. This is a place where groups of Ukrainian children are brought. They are very quickly trying to brainwash them with Russian propaganda, to establish which children pose a danger to the Russian occupation authorities, who can be returned and have no doubt that this child is already ready to be a real Russian, and who should be deported directly to the territory of Russia, placed in a Russian family. That is, you know, such a buffer, an intermediate center, after which the future fate of every Ukrainian child is determined,” the ombudsman explained.

He added that there are no official statistics on how many children Russia has removed from the occupied territories.

At the same time, as Lubinets noted, 1.6 million Ukrainian children were in the territories of Ukraine at the time of their occupation by the Russian Federation.

“The first Ukrainian child we officially recorded who was deported was a Ukrainian child from the Ukrainian Crimea, and it was in 2014. If you take the general picture, consider that 1.6 million Ukrainian children lived in the territory that is now under Russian occupation. Lived until the moment of this occupation. No one knows how many of them are already physically on the territory of the Russian Federation. For example, the representative of the Russian president on children, she publicly stated in an interview in 2022 that there are more than 700,000 Ukrainian children on the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said.

According to the Ombudsman, Russia does not provide any verified information regarding the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children to its territory.

Meanwhile, the head of the legal department of the Save Ukraine charitable foundation Myroslava Kharchenko noted that Russia is trying to hide the crimes of child abduction, and from 2023 the process of returning Ukrainian children from the occupied territories or the territory of the Russian Federation has become much more complicated.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Children’s Ombudsman, Maria Lvova-Belova, on suspicion of deportation of Ukrainian children.

“They started hiding children from that moment, they started making obstacles in their return. They started interrogating mothers who pick up their children for two or three days at a time. They began to deport them, that is, they began to do everything to hide their crime. And yet, despite the fact that they say that they don’t care, no, they don’t care, they are still afraid of international responsibility,” said the head of the legal department of the Save Ukraine charity fund, which helps children leave for the territory controlled by Ukraine.

See more about the detention of Ukrainian children in the occupied territories, their deportation to the Russian Federation and all the difficulties of returning to their homeland in the next episode of the TV project Krym.Realii: “Katya has been preparing her escape for three years. Children in the occupation: how to explain to them that they are Ukrainians?”.

Read also: “Children are not bargaining chips in war” – US senators demand the return of deported Ukrainians

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.”

In September, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that thanks to the Bring Kids Back UA initiative and the support of partners, 1,625 Ukrainian children have already been returned to Ukraine.

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.

Read also: The OSCE PA appointed Karina Edebrink as a special representative on the deportation of Ukrainian children