Ukraine is increasing diplomatic and legal pressure on Russia to return Ukrainian children. Recently, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that should facilitate this process. UNN spoke with Maksym Maksymov, head of projects for the President of Ukraine's "Bring Kids Back UA" initiative, who reported that 1892 children had been returned to their homeland.
Public organizations and international partners have joined the state in returning children abducted by Russia.
At the same time, the Ministry of Justice is already processing over 20,000 reports of deportation or forced displacement, of which 9,221 cases have already been verified. However, Russia's resistance makes the process extremely difficult and dangerous.
Russia does not want to cooperate. Moreover, it systematically opposes the return of children. That is why their names are changed, they are scattered across different remote regions, and all of them are given Russian passports: because all this complicates the identification, search, and establishment of the children's whereabouts, and, accordingly, the return processes. Well, and I'm not even talking about the difficulties of free movement to the occupied territories. Purely politically, it is absolutely not beneficial for Russia to return our children, because they are returning witnesses of war crimes, at the very least
An important element of the work is international cooperation and documentation of crimes. Ukraine works closely with human rights organizations and, in particular, the Yale University Humanitarian Lab. The Yale team provided evidence of forced adoptions and the existence of 210 institutions used by Russia systematically to justify the induction and militarization of Ukrainian children, Maksymov says. These materials have already been considered by the UN Security Council.
Read more about the process of searching, returning, and reintegrating children in the UNN material "Children abducted by Russia: the truth that resonated throughout the world".