In April, Lyudmila, from the Chernihiv region, received a call from Donetsk, controlled by pro-Russian separatists, informing her that her grandson was in a local hospital. 11-year-old Sasha arrived there from Mariupol, besieged at the time by Russian troops. With the start of the Russian Federation’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, due to the constant massive attacks on the city, the boy’s family hid in the bomb shelter of the Ilyich factory, leaving only in an emergency. Then one day Sasha was attacked and was wounded in the eye.

Sasha’s story

“First aid was provided to him by our (Ukrainian military. – Ed.) right in the bunker. When they were surrounded by Russian invaders, the Ukrainian military surrendered, and Sasha and her mother were taken to Bezymennoye (a village not far from Mariupol, where the Russians set up a filtration camp. – Red). The daughter went to one side and the grandson was sent to the Donetsk regional hospital with the words that they were taking him to a shelter and that the address would be given to the mother. They lied and didn’t even let go,” says Lyudmila in an interview with DW, according to her grandson. It was then that the boy saw his mother for the last time. Her whereabouts are still unknown to the family.

Having received the news from her grandson, Lyudmila, who has two more minor children, had no doubts – she had to go get Sasha. “These people (medical staff at the hospital in Donetsk. – Red.) I begged them not to take him anywhere, so that no one would adopt him until I did the paperwork,” says the woman.

It took two months to restore the lost documents in Mariupol and arrange for temporary guardianship, and in late June Lyudmila left. The road to Donetsk took five days. According to Lyudmila, the child was delivered without any problems, thus the boy became one of 50 children who managed to return to the territory of Kyiv-controlled Ukraine from the occupation.

“About 7,000 children were deported to Russia”

As Oksana Filipishina, who works on children’s rights in the office of the Commissioner for Human Rights at the Verkhovna Rada, noted in an interview with DW, there are individual children and groups of children from family orphanages among them. Speaking about cases of exporting children to territory not controlled by Ukrainian authorities, representatives of official bodies use the term “deportation”.

Children’s drawings in one of the bomb shelters in Gostomel

Thus, according to the National Information Bureau, as of August 19, 6,950 children are considered officially deported to the Russian Federation or the territories of Ukraine occupied by it. According to Filipishina, these are the general data of all state bodies in Ukraine, which became aware of the export of children.

“Since the start of the Russian Federation’s large-scale war, the Human Rights Commissioner of the Verkhovna Rada has submitted information about 1,925 children to the information office. 73% of this number are children from the Donetsk region, mainly from Mariupol. occupied by the Kyiv region and the Kharkiv region is the third,” she said, representative of the commissioner for the observance of the rights of the child and the family on the situation on 19 August.

“If the children were not invited and removed, it could be called deportation”

ZMINA’s Human Rights Center also works with requests for possible deportation of children. However, according to the center’s legal affairs director Alena Luneva, it is difficult to talk about the systemic nature of the problem, as there are methodological difficulties in identifying such facts, especially in relation to orphaned children already during full-time. Russian Federation war. As Luneva notes, all the cases known to the center concern children who were injured or lost their parents or guardians and were taken from the territories occupied this year to the part of Donbass not controlled by Kyiv since 2014-2015. The exact number of such children is unknown, she says.

Russian soldiers near the regional children’s tuberculosis sanatorium in Severodonetsk

Luneva also believes that each particular case must be considered individually and whether the child was really removed to avoid danger, if measures were taken to search for relatives and if it was possible to take the child to the territory of the country of origin. citizenship. “If the children were not requested and taken away, this can be called deportation. If the authorities learn of cases of children being taken to the territory of the Russian Federation, this is deportation and kidnapping in the language of national law. However, there is no there is reason to say this in all cases, because in some situations there were even attempts to search for relatives and offers to take the child”, observes the human rights activist.

At the same time, Oksana Filipishina, representative of the Commissioner for the Rights of the Child and the Family, said that she was aware of the fact that 450 children are in the Rostov region of the Russian Federation, nine children in the Moscow region, whose mother-educator disappeared in Mariupol, and 108 children in occupied Donetsk, which, as the Filipina suggests, can be taken to the Russian Federation. The official is convinced that with such actions the Russian Federation violates, in particular, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Population in Time of War.

“Part of the children lost during the war can be taken to the Russian Federation”

The public organization “Magnolia”, which is a partner of the international federation Missing Children Europe, also believes that some of the children lost during the war could have been taken to the Russian Federation. As of August 18, the organization was looking for 74 missing minors, mostly from regions of Ukraine that have fallen under occupation or from parts of Ukraine where hostilities are taking place.

Marina Lipovetskaya, head of the organization’s “Child Tracking Service”, said in an interview with DW that there are even two children among them, who were reportedly deported to Belarusian Gomel during the Gostomel occupation of Kyiv region. In addition, in the work of the organization there are cases of disappearance of children who witnessed the probable war crimes of the Russians.

Photos of children near a destroyed house in Mariupol

“During the attack in the Zhytomyr region, a family – parents and two daughters aged 8 and 15 returned to Kyiv via the Zhytomyr highway and collided with the Russian military, who opened fire on the car. The parents died on the spot, the eldest girl was injured in the leg. The girls were separated, the youngest was taken and left on the side of the road in a neighboring village, and the eldest was taken in another direction. Where this child was and what was done to him is still unknown”, Lipovetskaya says about the situation according to the younger girl’s words.

Exporting orphans from Donbass to the Russian Federation cannot be called “evacuation”

At the same time, the relevant departments of the Russian Federation publicly report the so-called “evacuation” and “rescue” of orphans from the occupied parts of the Donbass and their placement in Russian foster families. Oksana Filipishina notes that, according to her data, we are talking about children taken from the self-proclaimed “LPR” and “DPR” before a full-scale invasion has even begun. Children from institutions located in the Donbass territories controlled by Kyiv “were evacuated in advance” by Ukraine, guarantees the representative of the commissioner.

According to Marina Lipovetskaya, head of the Children’s Tracing Service of the Magnolia Public Organization, there is no reason to call the removal of orphans from the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the Russian Federation “evacuation”. “Evacuation provides for the organization of this process by the authorities of Ukraine, and this cannot be done in the aggressor country. What they call evacuation is actually kidnapping of their own volition. Also, not all children in institutions are orphans, which means they have the right to be reunited with their family,” Lipovetskaya notes.

At the same time, at the end of May, Russia simplified the procedure for obtaining citizenship for children captured in the occupation. And that opens up the possibility of its adoption by Russians, warn human rights activists. According to Russian authorities, Ukrainian children received their first Russian passports in July. Both human rights activists interviewed by DW and the Ukrainian authorities believe that such a step brings signs of genocide. Because genocide, according to Luneva, does not necessarily involve the “physical destruction of a person”, but also the “destruction of identity”.