The Financial Times (FT) in its report on June 12 said it had positively identified four Ukrainian children, each abducted from the occupied territories in early 2022, as listed for adoption in Russia.
The FT said it had used a combination of image recognition, publicly available records, along with statements from Ukrainian officials and children’s relatives, to identify and locate the four children on the adoption website usynovite.ru (adopt.ru) which is linked to the Russian government.
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The youngsters, aged from eight to 15, are all listed in Ukraine’s database of missing children. On the adoption site, one of the children was given a different name with a different age to those contained in Ukrainian documents. Another’s Ukrainian name was listed under a “Russified” version of the original.
None of the children’s details indicate any connection with Ukraine, though they were all taken from orphanages in eastern and southern Ukraine with one ending up in Crimea, and the others in the Tula and Orenburg regions.
The usynovite.ru site, which is managed by the NGO “Center for the Development of Social Projects” claims to have the details of more than 35,000 children seeking adoptive parents.
In April 2022, 46 infants and children were abducted from an orphanage in Kherson by officials linked with Russian President Vladimir Putin with the intention of permanently transferring them from Ukraine.
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According to another investigation in The New York Times, the adoption site includes of 22 of them, listed as coming from Crimea, for adoption. The FT was able to match 17 of those against Ukrainian records.
While international law allows children to be removed from conflict zones to a place of safety, there are clearly defined rules that govern the process. This includes informing the local authorities of the intention to remove the child, officially registering the child’s movement routes and final destination, and allowing access to intermediaries charged with checking on the child’s welfare.
Russia failed to do any of this in relation to the so-called “evacuation” from the Kherson orphanage which Stephen Rapp, the former US Ambassador-at-Large for International Criminal Justice, says amounts to a forced removal.
The details presented in the articles of the two news sites is further confirmation of what Ukrainian government officials and legal experts say point to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. They could be used as further evidence in the International Criminal Court case against Putin and Russia’s Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova.
According to Ukrainian authorities, almost 20,000 children were forcibly removed from the occupied territories. The fate of most of them remains unknown but at least now some of them have been tracked down.
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