19,514 children were illegally taken from Ukraine to Russia. Such data are provided by the National Information Bureau under the Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine.
The department also clarified that “there are about 4,390 status children in the temporarily occupied territories and in Russia, which include orphans and children deprived of parental care.”
The National Information Bureau updates information on the Children of War portal. The collected data will be used by Ukrainian and international investigators to bring to justice those responsible for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children, the report says.
This is updated data, before that it was reported that more than 16 thousand children were deported from Ukraine to Russia during the war. Last week, 17 children returned to Ukraine from the Kherson and Kharkiv regions, who during the Russian occupation were taken deep into the occupied territories or to Russia.
In February of this year, Yale University researchers published a report that provides facts about how the Russian authorities prevent the return of children to Ukraine and their “re-education” so that they become pro-Russian. The authors of the document also give examples of the transfer of Ukrainian children for adoption to families in Russia.
The head of the UN refugee agency, Filippo Grandi, said earlier that Russia is violating “fundamental principles for the protection of children” in wartime by issuing Russian passports to Ukrainian children and giving them up for adoption in Russia.
For the illegal deportation of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and children’s ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova. As explained in court, there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that the President of the Russian Federation is personally responsible for this.