A teenage Ukrainian boy escaped Russian-occupied Lugansk city, where he had spent all his life, because he wanted to live in free Ukraine.
When the city was occupied, he was just seven and his only memory of his native country was the yellow-blue flag waving above the playground on his first day of school. His escape, he says, “still feels like a very nice dream,” completely unlike his previous reality under Russian military occupation.
Now think about Ukrainians and what it means for us to have the support of the United States, the world’s most powerful country, in remembering and — very often — saving those lost children. Think what it meant when we heard that funding for a Yale University team had been terminated, and the (limited but considerable) relief when Secretary of State Marco Rubio temporarily restored it so the program could transfer its priceless research to Europe.
Many, many thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted by Russia. The mass abductions are not absent-mindedness, they are Kremlin policy.
Stolen children are “newly minted Russians” in Putin’s eyes, according to a Foreign Policy article. Ukrainians are being “treated as a reserve army of future Russians destined to increase not simply the Russian Federation’s population but also to reverse the expected decline of the Slavic majority inside Russia,” the article explained.
For the children, Russia’s dreams have been a living nightmare. As a BBC investigation said: “Many children said they were separated from parents, were not allowed to go home or call their relatives.” Others have been forced into the Russian military and required to fight their own compatriots. Large numbers have simply vanished.
For these stolen children, separated from their parents, adopted by strangers, and forced to consume Russian propaganda, we can only ensure they are not forgotten and that we track them and try to bring them home. Any assistance (and there’s a lot from Europe, including its police agency, Europol) is precious.
As of today, according to official and verified data, 19,546 Ukrainian children have been deported or forcibly displaced; however, the actual numbers may be much higher due to the difficulty in documenting every case.
Yale and others have helped identify 8,400 kids held in Russia, although so far only 1,240 have been returned, highlighting the exceptional complexity and prolonged nature of the return process. It is important to note that the forced displacement of children has signs of genocide, emphasizes Gunduz Mamedov, Doctor of Law, Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine in 2019-2022. “According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the forcible displacement of children from one group to another is recognized as one of the manifestations of this most severe international crime,” he adds.
The US Department of State has been helping Ukraine identify the locations of Ukrainian children in Russia and on occupied territories since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
The program has focused “especially [on] those children whose parents were killed or arrested, making them orphans who were kidnapped by Russia, says Mykola Kuleba, co-founder, executive director of the charity organization “Save Ukraine.” It found that the children were scattered across Russia. One study found over 300 adopted children were identified in Russian families within Russia. “This information is very valuable,” Kuleba said. “Not only for finding and returning these children, which we are doing, but also for a future tribunal.”
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He has worked with Yale and exchanged data that helps Save Ukraine to locate children and return them in the future. “I don’t want to say that this is solely thanks to Yale, as we work with various partners,” but he stressed its importance.
Kateryna Rashevska, human rights defender and lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, says that the Yale Humanitarian Laboratory has done a lot to analyze Russian crimes in Ukraine.
And this covers a wide range of crimes and violations of international humanitarian law, which, for example, also extended to the forced imposition of Russian Federation citizenship, even though its work with children has garnered the most attention.
Initially, investigators focused on forced displacement, deportation, and re-education in special camps, where Russia housed 6,000 of the stolen children. Later, came a report on their forced moves into Russian families.
This analytical work had a significant impact, as did the resulting advocacy and communication efforts. The experts had some access to American intelligence data and also had their own unique methodology for identifying children and their whereabouts.
For now, it seems the Yale Humanitarian Laboratory will lose its funding in a few weeks so children’s advocates are focusing on how best to keep the work going. They aren’t interested in the politics, only in the outcome — which is to bring the stolen kids home to the families and their country.
“Instead of simply criticizing and, to some extent, intervening in the internal politics of the United States, we should try to figure out how we can establish cooperation and quickly fill this gap so that it does not affect the main issue, the children, and the pace of their return,” Rashevska says.
That will restore hope for all those involved that young people trapped far away in an alien country can be saved, and one day returned to everything they know and love.
Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary ‘Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Media Officer for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
Olena Kozachenko is a media/research assistant at Amnesty International Ukraine. She has worked in journalism for over 10 years, including as an investigative journalist. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she has been working in the Ukrainian PR ARMY team to ensure that events in Ukraine do not go unnoticed abroad. Since 2014, she has been a volunteer and wife of a serviceman.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.* *CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.
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