A false news where children orphaned by the war are supposedly given up for adoption

During the

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. The invasion has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. It has caused Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. ...

, thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted,

deported Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term ''expulsion'' is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation ...

, and forcibly adopted to the

Russian Federation Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...

. The

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...

has declared that allegations are "credible", and that Russian forces have sent Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption as part of a large scale program. An

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...

investigation confirmed that Russian forces forcibly resettled Ukrainian children without their consent, lied to them that their parents rejected them, used them for propaganda, established summer camps for Ukrainian orphans and "patriotic education", and

Russified Russification (russian: русификация, rusifikatsiya), or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian cultur ...

them by giving them a Russian citizenship and parents, with the aim to erase their Ukrainian identity. Estimates of the number of deported Ukrainian children to Russia range from 13,000 to 307,000, without any indication as to when they could return to their home cities. The Ukrainian Office of the Prosecutor General also claimed that nearly 800 children had died or disappeared in the process of deportation. Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories
Children of War.
Accessed Dec 1, 2022. This would, according to

international law International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...

, including the 1948 Genocide Convention, constitute

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Lat ...

Background

The first reports of forced deportations to Russia came mid-March, during the

siege of Mariupol The siege of Mariupol began on 24 February 2022 and lasted until 20 May 2022, as part of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It saw fighting between the Russian Armed Forces (alongside the Donetsk People's Militia) and the Ukrainian Armed ...

. However, Russia started transferring children from Ukrainian territories as soon as 2014. Already on 22 March 2022, Ukraine and U.S. authorities claimed more than 2,300 children had been kidnapped by Russian forces from

Donetsk Donetsk ( , ; uk, Донецьк, translit=Donets'k ; russian: Донецк ), formerly known as Aleksandrovka, Yuzivka (or Hughesovka), Stalin and Stalino (see also: cities' alternative names), is an industrial city in eastern Ukraine loca ...

and

Luhansk Oblast Luhansk Oblast ( uk, Луга́нська о́бласть, translit=Luhanska oblast; russian: Луганская область, translit=Luganskaya oblast; also referred to as Luhanshchyna, uk, Луга́нщина) is the easternmost oblast ...

Overview

According to a report by

Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) is a Montreal-based non-governmental organization dedicated to pursuing justice through the protection and promotion of human rights. The RWCHR's name and mission is inspired by Raoul Wallenbe ...

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...

and New Lines Institute in

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

, there are "reasonable grounds to conclude" that Russia is in breach of two articles of the 1948 Genocide Convention, among them the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, in itself a genocidal act. On 30 May 2022,

Vladimir Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who holds the office of president of Russia. Putin has served continuously as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime min ...

signed a decree that streamlined the process of giving Ukrainian orphans or those without parental care Russian citizenship. By 11 April, two-thirds of Ukraine's 7.5 million children had been displaced according to the U.N. Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner, Lyudmila Denysova, and U.N. ambassador

Sergiy Kyslytsya Sergiy Olehovych Kyslytsya ( uk, Сергій Олегович Кислиця; born 15 August 1969) is a Ukrainian career diplomat, who serves as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine and Permanent Representative of Ukraine t ...

, stated at that time that more than 120,000 children had been deported to Russia. By May 26, more than 238,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported to Russian territory. Ukraine raised the issue at a

OSCE The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is the world's largest regional security-oriented intergovernmental organization with observer status at the United Nations. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, prom ...

meeting in the beginning of June, where the head of Ukraine's mission Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk quoted a message from a Ukrainian child forcibly adopted, despite having close living relations. According to

Ukrainska Pravda ''Ukrainska Pravda'' ( uk, Українська правда, lit=Ukrainian Truth) is a Ukrainian online newspaper founded by Georgiy Gongadze on 16 April 2000 (the day of the Ukrainian constitutional referendum). Published mainly in Ukraini ...

, Russia have taken 267 orphans from

Mariupol Mariupol (, ; uk, Маріу́поль ; russian: Мариу́поль) is a city in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. It is situated on the northern coast ( Pryazovia) of the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Kalmius River. Prior to the 2022 Russia ...

Rostov Rostov ( rus, Росто́в, p=rɐˈstof) is a town in Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, one of the oldest in the country and a tourist center of the Golden Ring. It is located on the shores of Lake Nero, northeast of Moscow. Population: While ...

to be made Russian citizens, supervised by

Maria Lvova-Belova Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova (russian: Мария Алексеевна Львова-Белова, ; born 25 October 1984) is a Russian politician serving as the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia since 2021. On 17 Marc ...

. It also reported that Russian authorities had looked for and collected orphaned children, to be taken to an unknown destination. In June 2022,

Mikhail Mizintsev Mikhail Yevgenyevich Mizintsev (russian: Михаил Евгеньевич Мизинцев; born 10 September 1962) is a Russian colonel general currently serving as the deputy minister of defence of Russia for overseeing logistics since 24 Se ...

, head of the

National Defense Management Center The National Defense Management Center, also known as the National Defense Control Center (NDCC) (russian: Национальный центр управления обороной РФ, ) НЦУО, formerly the Central Command Post of the Gener ...

, claimed 1,936,911 Ukrainians had been deported to Russia, of whom 307,423 of were children. On 7 September a United Nations official reported that there were credible accusations that Russian forces had sent Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption as part of a forced deportation programme, and the US ambassador informed the UN Security Council that more than 1,800 Ukrainian children had been transferred to Russia in July alone. On the Russian-occupied territory, thousand of Ukrainian children were taken by Russian forces to buses which drove them to Russia.

Russian propaganda The propaganda of the Russian Federation promotes views, perceptions or agendas of the government of Russia. The media include state-run outlets and online technologies, and may involve using "Soviet-style 'active measures' as an element of m ...

presented the arrival of these children as a humanitarian and patriotic gesture, describing them as abandoned children rescued from war. State-controlled TV stations showed officials giving teddy bears to these children in Russia. However, many of these children had parents in Ukraine, while in other cases their parents were either killed or imprisoned by the Russian forces. Sky News released CCTV footage dated June 2022 of Russian military entering an orphanage in Kherson City to search for orphans. As the locals hid the children because they heard about the plan of the Russians, the Russian military was unable to find anyone there, yet they confiscated files and computer archives from the orphanage. Another process for child abduction has been documented in a report from Amnesty International, released on 10 November 2022, on "Russia’s Unlawful Transfer And Abuse Of Civilians In Ukraine During ‘Filtration’". During so-called 'filtration' procedures, Russian or pro-Russian troops forcibly separated some children from their parents. An 11-year-old boy made a testimony for Amnesty International: One instance of children abduction relates to those in occupied parts of Ukraine, whose parents, egged on by Russian propaganda, voluntarily sent them to summer camps in

Crimea Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a pop ...

to shield them from the war. When Ukraine regained control of their home town, Russians refused to send the children back, detaining them for an indeterminate time, and sometimes maybe transferring them to Russia itself.

Reactions

Ukrainian authorities have claimed Putin's decree to be a way to "legalized the abduction of children from the territory of Ukraine". They have maintained this "grossly violate the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The

Foreign Ministry of Ukraine The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine ( uk, Міністерство закордонних справ України) is the ministry of the Ukrainian government that oversees the foreign relations of Ukraine. The head of the ministry is th ...

also believes that the actions may qualify as a forcible transfer of children from one human group to another. In a statement: "The most serious international crimes against children committed by Russian high-ranking officials and servicemen in Ukraine will be investigated, and the perpetrators will be prosecuted. Russia will not be able to avoid the strictest accountability."

UNICEF UNICEF (), originally called the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund in full, now officially United Nations Children's Fund, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to ...

Emergency Programs Director Manuel Fontaine told CBS News that UNICEF "are looking into how we can track or help on that", though stating they do not have ability to investigate at the moment. The

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, commonly known as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) or the United Nations Human Rights Office, is a department of the Secretariat of the United Nati ...

announced on 15 June 2022 that her agency had started an investigation into allegations of children forcibly deported from Ukraine to the Russian Federation. Genocide scholar

Timothy D. Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute f ...

has stated that " dnapping children ''en masse'' and seeking to assimilate them in a foreign culture is genocide according to Article 2 Section E of the 1948 genocide convention." On 21 December 2022, a French NGO, ''"For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours!"'', submitted vi
the law firm Vigo
a communication to

Karim Khan Mohammad Karim Khan Zand ( fa, محمدکریم خان زند, Mohammad Karīm Khân-e Zand; ) was the founder of the Zand Dynasty, ruling from 1751 to 1779. He ruled all of Iran (Persia) except for Khorasan. He also ruled over some of the Cau ...

, Chief Prosecutor for the

International Criminal Court The International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals f ...

, to contribute to "the investigation opened on 2 March 2022 by the Office of the Prosecutor, upon referral of the situation in Ukraine by a coordinated group of States Parties to the

Rome Statute The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998Michael P. Scharf (August 1998)''Results of the R ...

". The communication "relates to the forcible transfer and large-scale deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, in a clear attempt by the Russian authorities to erase, at least in part, Ukrainians as a national group with a distinct identity. These facts are likely to constitute several of the crimes listed in Article 5 of the

, and more specifically the crime of

(Article 6-e) and crimes against humanity (Article 7-d)".

Notes

References

External links