Kiev estimates that nearly 19,500 children have been deported to Russia since the start of the war. Moscow denies the children were abducted and says they were all taken for their own safety.
“This was our fifth rescue mission, and it was special not only in terms of the number of children we rescued, but also in terms of the complexity,” said Mykola Kuleba, director of the charity Save Ukraine and former Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights.
The group helped Ukrainian parents of children taken to Russia with logistics, transportation, and planning.
The grandmother, who was to be reunited with her two grandchildren, died suddenly during the trip and the children had to stay in Russia, Kuleba told a news conference in Kiev.
As noted by Kuleba, all of the children returned by his organization said that no one in Russia had even tried to find their relatives in Ukraine. Some children were told that their parents no longer needed them.
Children at the briefing said they were forced to stay in summer camps for four to six months and moved from place to place during their stay.
Moscow does not hide that it has taken thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia from the occupied territories, but it presents this as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and abandoned children in the conflict zone.
Russian children’s rights ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova, against whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant, says her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in the war zone. She insists that Russia did not remove any of the children against their will or against the wishes of their parents or legal guardians, and that their consent was always sought unless they were reported missing.
Kateryna Rashevskaya, a lawyer with the Ukrainian NGO Regional Center for Human Rights, told a briefing that they were collecting evidence on Russian officials’ deliberate obstruction of the return of Ukrainian children to their country.
Earlier, according to The Eastern Herald , Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine.
