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Why and How Russia Is Transferring Ukrainian Children
A complicated challenge is how to alert still largely ignorant parts of the international community to the scale, gravity and tragedy of Russia’s child removal policies
Starting in 2014 and especially since 2022, Moscow has implemented an outrageous policy of large-scale Russian state-enforced displacement and deportation of Ukrainian civilians including thousands of unaccompanied minors and teenagers.
One of the Russian invasion’s aims since 2022 has been to capture and then russify large numbers of Ukrainian citizens in order to prop up Russia’s declining population. This aim may be as important to Moscow as the annexation of Ukrainian territory.
Child displacement and deportation has been taking place in Ukraine’s occupied Crimea and Donbas since 2014. Yet, it did not become widely known until 2022 when the numbers of such illegal transfers rose sharply.
Between Feb. 24, 2022 and today, Russia had displaced or deported at least 19,546 unaccompanied Ukrainian children.
This is an official figure provided by the Ukrainian government’s ‘Children of War’ portal. However, this statistic includes only those children on whom information has been provided to the government by relatives, witnesses or local authorities regarding a child’s deportation to Russia or forcible transfer within the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and where such evidence is already undergoing verification.
Presumably, the real figure is considerably higher.
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