“The head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, announced the successful removal of eight Ukrainian children and teenagers from the occupied territories. Among those rescued are children who survived forced Russification, violent militarization and the threat of deportation”, — write: www.radiosvoboda.org
“The Russian security forces almost took the one-and-a-half-year-old boy from his mother after they found a contact with a Ukrainian military officer in her phone. A seventeen-year-old girl witnessed the beating and interrogation of her loved ones when Russian soldiers broke into their home. Sixteen-year-old and thirteen-year-old sisters were forced to study according to the Russian curriculum, harassed for speaking Ukrainian, and forcibly enrolled in the so-called “Movement of the First” – an organization that militarizes children and prepares them to serve in the army of the aggressor state. The father hid the ten-year-old boy at home for years in order to save him from forced studies in a Russian school,” informed the high-ranking official.
Yermak added that the children are getting the necessary help, renewing their documents and “gradually returning to normal life.”
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 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.