Russia has deported at least 17,000 Ukrainian children. Maybe even ten times more, estimates the Ukrainian human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets. Moscow does not deny, referring to the “transfers” of children, of whom 700,000 would be, by its own admission, in Russia where they would benefit from humanitarian aid far from the war. But the evidence of Russian war crimes is mounting. Some could even attest to a genocide, a crime against humanity. In an interview with Desk Russia, the lawyer at the International Criminal Court Emmanuel Daoud deplored last March acts that can be described as “war crimes, but also crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide”.
The NGO Save Ukraine, which helps Ukrainian families to recover their children, has repatriated 128 since the start of the war. Back home, the testimonies of these children support what a report from the Yale University Humanitarian Research Laboratory, published last February, demonstrated: Russia has set up a network of “re-education” camps for the Ukrainian children it deports.
According to this report, there are at least 43 camps, in Russia and Crimea, whose primary objective is to make young Ukrainians adhere to the values promoted by Russian propaganda. Now, the research lab is about to publish a second report, which spells out the process Russia has put in place to deport young Ukrainians.
According to this new report, of which the director of research delivered the main conclusions to Figaro, Russia sorts the children it deports into several categories. There are the “evacuees”, according to the terminology used by Moscow, that is to say children with disabilities or with difficult family situations who had been placed in Ukrainian state institutions, and who were transferred to foster families in Russia; children abducted by Russian soldiers on the battlefield, in Kherson, Kharkiv, or even Mariupol; children separated from their parents in screening points where residents of areas occupied by the Russian army are sorted and potentially deported; and children from occupied localities in Ukraine’s Donbass region.
The latter, for example, are sent to camps with or without the consent of their parents, and there undergo “a Russian patriotic education and military training, including the handling of weapons and military vehicles”, explains Nathaniel Raymond, director of the research laboratory.
For Olga Yerokhina, press officer for Save Ukraine, this “patriotic education” serves to erase what is part of Ukrainian identity. “Children forcibly learn Russian history, language and literature. They are told, almost every day, that there is no future in Ukraine, that a good future is only possible in Russia,” she laments.
Russia is “literally trying to buy” these children who are often from poor families, adds the press officer: “We give them clothes and gadgets, and they are freed from all responsibility, from all tasks”. The stays, paid for by the Russian state, are an opportunity for families in the occupied regions to offer their children what they believe to be holidays, and to keep them away from the fighting… But, according to Nathaniel Raymond, 10% of children deported from Donbass are then placed in Russian foster families instead of reuniting with their parents.
The children “evacuated”, according to the terminology used by Moscow, that is to say removed from medical institutions and Ukrainian orphanages, are also mainly destined to be adopted in Russia, indicates Nathaniel Raymond. In a context of demographic decline reinforced by the war, Russia has simplified the procedure for adopting Ukrainian children, which until then was rare and complex.
Last March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, its commissioner for children’s rights, for the war crime of “illegal deportation” of Ukrainian children. Following this measure, Putin notably decided not to go to the BRICS summit (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), organized next month in Johannesburg… But following arrest warrants, “it has become much more difficult to save our children from expulsion. Nothing has changed, except that the main criminal realizes that each child brought home automatically becomes a witness to his crimes”, however lamented Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, the organization which works tirelessly for the repatriation of deported children.