About 35.000 Ukrainian children are still listed as missing, and United States (U.S.) researchers estimate that most of them are located on the territory of Russia or in areas under Russian occupation. Families claim they are forced into desperate and risky moves in an attempt to save their children.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022, children have been taken from orphanages, from battlefields after the death of parents, or directly from family homes, often by force. Russia has rejected demands for their return. A Russian official recently, during peace talks in Turkey, accused Ukraine of “staging a show about lost children.” A mother said in an interview how she saved her two teenage sons by her own efforts, who had been detained in a Russian camp for almost six months.
After Russian forces occupied Kherson, her hometown in eastern Ukraine, in September 2022, a neighbor suggested she send her sons to a children’s camp in Anapa, a resort on the Black Sea coast in Russia. “The trip was supposed to last 21 days, it was free, and the children were supposed to return to Kherson after that. They wanted that too, but it was a big mistake on my part,” she says.
“I didn’t know what to do”
At the end of 2022, Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson, but her children remained in the camp on the other side of the frontline, and Russian authorities did not allow them to return. “The camp administration refused to let the children go without my physical presence. I didn’t know what to do,” she added.
In the end, with the help of a Ukrainian organization, Natalia obtained passports and Ukrainian identification documents for her children. Then she traveled alone across the border to the Russian city of Anapa on the northern coast of the Black Sea, passing through numerous border checkpoints where she had to explain to Russian soldiers why she was in the country.
She traveled for six days, in the midst of shelling, before finally being reunited with her children in February 2023. “You can’t even imagine my emotions because my children are everything I have,” she says.
Yale: Probably another 35.000 children in Russia
So far, only 1.366 children have been returned or have escaped back to Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian organization Bring Kids Back. A team of experts from Yale University estimated that as many as 35.000 children may be located in Russia and the occupied territories. It is feared that many were taken by Russian forces and sent to military camps, into foster care, or even adopted by Russian families.
Through extensive examination of Russian databases, official documents, family connections, and even satellite images of Russian locations, government buildings, and other sources, the Yale team managed to establish the identities of thousands of children.
“This is probably the largest abduction of children in war since World War II, comparable to the Nazi Germanization of Polish children,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Laboratory for Humanitarian Research investigating abductions at Yale.
Children must sing the Russian anthem
Testimonies from recently rescued children reveal that they underwent military training in camps and were punished for speaking the Ukrainian language. “We had to sing the Russian anthem and draw the tricolor,” says one rescued nine-year-old child.
Children are also made aware that their parents will suffer consequences if they do not obey, said Daria Kasyanova, president of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, which advocates for the repatriation of abducted children.
Forced deportation and abduction of Ukrainian children is not a new phenomenon, activists and researchers say. Kasyanova says she witnessed similar abductions and deportations during the Russian invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. At that time, she worked on evacuating more than 40.000 people from Donetsk and Luhansk, including 12.000 children.
Laws recently changed to make it easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children
“My daughter was 11 years old then, and some of her friends who stayed were sent to military camps in Russia,” she says. Activists fear that many children will disappear into the Russian foster system, where laws were recently changed to allow Ukrainian children to be adopted and fostered by Russian citizens.
“Sometimes there are cases where one parent is in Ukrainian territory, and the other is in occupation with the child. And if that parent dies or is arrested, then the child is left alone and at risk of being placed in an orphanage. And if that happens, it is basically impossible to bring the child back. They will be lost,” says Kasyanova.
Raymond points out that researching abductions is crucial. “It needs to be documented that these children were forcibly deported. If you take a child from one ethnic or national group and try to make them part of another, that is a war crime,” he says. The International Criminal Court (ICC) agrees with that assessment.
“Territories are being discussed, and these are our children”
In March 2023, it issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the war crime of illegal deportation of Ukrainian children. The return of children remains one of Ukraine’s key demands in any peace negotiations.
“Territories are being discussed, and our people, our children, are our territories. How could we give them up? These are our children. They are Ukrainians and must be returned. Russia has no right to them,” says Kseniya, an evacuation expert from the Ukrainian humanitarian organization Helping to Leave.
Raymond adds that children are now being used as a negotiating tool. “When the Russians launched the program, they believed they would win quickly, so they designed it not to keep the children but to ‘Russify’ Ukraine through them. As the situation quickly began to collapse, their propaganda had to move from the stage of hiding responsibility to the stage where these children are used as hostages, a means of blackmail in negotiations,” she said.
