The Russian occupation forces took more than 100,000 Ukrainian children out of Donetsk and Luhansk regions for “treatment”, the National Center of Resistance of Ukraine claims, citing the Kyiv Independent.

The National Resistance Center operates in the Special Operations Center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

According to the center, Russia allocated 1.4 billion rubles ($17 million) for the so-called “medical inspection program.”

Most Ukrainian children are “recommended for treatment in Russia”, and parents cannot refuse treatment without the threat of deprivation of parental rights, the center reported.

Since the beginning of 2023, 75,000 children have undergone medical examination in the Donetsk region, 39,000 of them have been “prescribed treatment” in Russia, the report says.

Pathologies were “detected” in 66,000 of the 94,000 examined children of the Luhansk region, writes the Center of National Resistance.

Some doctors force parents to pay bribes not to report any illness, the National Resistance Center added.

The Ukrainian National Children of War database also reports that more than 19,000 children have been abducted from Ukraine and taken to Russia since the full invasion of Moscow on February 24, 2022.

Ukraine managed to return some of the children abducted by Russia, but the details of this process are not disclosed.

Daria Gerasymchuk, adviser to the President of Ukraine on children’s rights, reported on April 9 that after returning to Ukraine from Russia, some children complained of beatings and other punishments for refusing to sing the Russian national anthem and mentioned that they were Ukrainians.

As a punishment, Ukrainian children were not allowed to go out and were forced to rewrite texts in Russian, she added.

According to Gerasymchuk, the children said that they were told that their parents “abandoned” them and that they should not return to Ukraine, where “no one is waiting for them.”

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