Ukraine says nearly 20,000 children deported by Russia
- 8 December, 02:31
Russia has deported around 20,000 Ukrainian children since the start of Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine.
According to Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets, the official number of deported children stands at over 19,540.
“This is against the background of the Russian Federation continuing to deport more and more groups of Ukrainian children from our state every day,” Lubinets said while addressing a human rights conference in capital Kyiv on December 7. “If we return one child every day, it will take us 55 years,” he stressed.
In his words, despite the small number of means that could help with the return of abducted children, the Ukrainian authorities have many initiatives in this regard and are constantly looking for new ones.
Forced deportation of Ukrainian children has been condemned by the international community.
On March 17, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova in relation to the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. The ICC’s arrest warrant has been welcomed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that recognized forced deportation of Ukrainian civilians from the Russian-occupied territories as a genocide in a ruling on April 27.
A special report presented by the OSCE on May 4 stated that Russia's forced deportation of Ukrainian children could be recognized as a crime against humanity.
Ukraine claims that the forced deportation of Ukrainian children and POWs took place on the territory of Belarus with the participation of the Belarusian authorities. Meanwhile, the Russian State Duma has officially reported that 700,000 Ukrainian children had been deported to Russia since 2014.
