More than 1,000 Ukrainian children have been taken into preliminary custody in Russia

More than a thousand children taken out of Ukraine have been taken into Russian families under preliminary guardianship. This is three times more than was officially announced, established the publication “Vazhney istorii”. It is not known how many children were moved from Ukraine to Russia during the war: estimates vary from 4.4 to 19.5 thousand.

At the end of 2022, the Commissioner for the Rights of the Child in Russia, Maria Lvova-Belova, stated that 380 children taken from the territory of Ukraine were placed in families. In the future, throughout the current year, she calls the same number. However, the report on the activity of the government of the Rostov region for 2022 shows that 1,184 children who arrived “without legal representatives from the territories of Donbass and Ukraine” were placed under preliminary guardianship.

It is not known whether these children lived in orphanages in Ukraine or lost their parents during the war. “Important Histories” also note that children could go to Russia not with their parents, but with other relatives: only parents or official guardians are considered legal representatives of the child. In such a case, a part of the applicants for the appointment of guardianship could be submitted by relatives.

“Vazhnye istorii” based on open sources established the whereabouts of 290 children from Ukraine in 23 regions of Russia. The largest number of children — 47 people — are in the Novosibirsk Region. At least 30 children ended up in families in the Moscow region, 25 in Kaluga, and 24 in Nizhny Novgorod. Another 21 children live in the families of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, 20 in the Leningrad Region. Less than 20 children were taken to other regions.

International organizations emphasize that the Russian authorities are not making the necessary efforts to find relatives of neglected children deported to Russia in Ukraine. According to Lvova-Belova herself, by the end of March 2023, only 16 such children were able to reunite with their relatives in Ukraine and other countries.

The Ukrainian side has repeatedly called on Russia and Lvov-Belov personally to provide lists of children with Ukrainian citizenship who were taken from Ukraine to Russia after February 24 last year or who are in the territories occupied by Russia, in order to be able to start searching for their parents.

• In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a warrant for the arrest of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. The court suspects Putin and Lvova-Belova of committing war crimes – forcible deportations and displacement of the population, in particular children, from the territories of Ukraine occupied by the Russian army. International law can consider this as genocide.
• In May of last year, Putin signed a decree on simplifying the granting of Russian citizenship to Ukrainian children, which opens the way to their adoption in Russia.