HOMEWARD: WHO IS RETURNING DEPORTED UKRAINIAN CHILDREN FROM RUSSIA AND HOW

War crime or genocide?

The fate of Ukrainian children illegally removed from the country has continued to spark outrage among Ukrainian society and the international community. One high-profile event in this regard was the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March 2023 for Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. As reported by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG), the two were charged under Articles 8(2)(a)(vii) of the Rome Statute on "unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement" and 8(2)(b)(viii) "the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory." That is, Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children qualifies as a war crime.

However, some see this as more than just a war crime. On December 26, 2023, KHPG presented its submission to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, where it established that the actions of the Russian Federation constitute genocide. This is not the first submission to the ICC on this matter, but previous ones addressed the Court about the situation with children, leaving the question of labelling the crime to its discretion. Mykola Komarovskyi, a lawyer with KHPG, notes that genocide is a difficult category to prove, as no act of forced removal of children has previously been qualified as genocide.

The Deportation Process: How It Happens

Usually, Russian occupiers forced children’s guardians to give permission for their children to be temporarily transferred to children's camps, where they then remained for an indefinite period. In the worst-case scenario, children could be forcibly taken away and sent not to camps, but to orphanages. The vast majority of these children have parents or other relatives in Ukraine. If children were brought up in orphanages, their legal representative is the state in the form of the director of the institution caring for them. Russia refers to their actions as "evacuation" and "saving children." However, the stories of specific families show that Russia had no intention of returning children to their families, and was instead determined to prevent family reunification. Russian authorities tried to re-educate the children with a Russian patriotic spirit and convince them that there was no one waiting for them in Ukraine.

In December 2023, Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets reported that the Office of the Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights had verified the deportation of 19,546 Ukrainian children. The real figure may be much higher, because Russia has not provided Ukraine with any information, and verification is very difficult. According to Lubinets, at least 380 children have been placed under so-called temporary care, which he regards as an adoption. As of December 2023, only 522 children have been returned. This process is very complicated, and civil society organizations are actively involved in it. Two such organizations are discussed below.

Ukrainian Child Rights Network: preparing guardians, money, and an international coalition

Darya Kasyanova has been working with orphans and children deprived of parental care for over 10 years. In 2014, she herself was forced to leave her hometown of Donetsk due to Russian aggression. Darya is the program director of the charity organization SOS Children's Villages Ukraine. The organization, along with 32 others, is a member of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network (UCRN), where Darya is also the head of the board, and represents this association in the Coordination Headquarters for the Protection of Children's Rights under Martial Law under the Cabinet of Ministers. In May 2023, UCRN launched The Way Home project in partnership with the international humanitarian organization Save the Children in Ukraine.

Darya says that there are no straightforward cases. Each return of a child is an individual story that requires a lot of effort and can be thwarted at any moment. When parents or guardians (in other words, legal representatives of the child) apply to the organization, it begins to search for information on the whereabouts of the child and prepare applicants for departure. One of the most common problems is that people do not have the resources to make the long journey through European countries to Russia. Many of them were under occupation or were forced to leave their homes in frontline territories, leaving behind everything they owned. Therefore, all expenses before the start of the project The Way Home were taken over by SOS Children's Villages Ukraine.

"On average, the budget for one return is about 600 euros, but it depends on the case. In addition to financial challenges, there are also bureaucratic ones, which state bodies help to overcome," says Darya.

After the organization’s first successes, Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk contacted Darya and offered assistance. The main help provided was speeding up the issuing of foreign passports or other necessary documents, which SOS Children's Villages Ukraine could not influence themselves. In front-line territories, government offices operated under extremely difficult conditions, so the accelerated provision of administrative services avoided the need to wait months for documents. A partner notary office in Kyiv notarized documents and translated them into Russian free of charge.

The next stage was planning the complex voyage through Belarus or the Baltic states. The organization thoroughly prepares guardians for the trip and keeps contact with them during the entire route.

SOS Children's Villages Ukraine has been working to bring kidnapped children home from Russia since the first months of the full-scale invasion. In October 2022, they managed to bring home a group of 37 children who had been taken to Russia during the occupation of Vovchansk District in Kharkiv Oblast. However, the arrival of a large group of guardians led to everyone being interrogated for many hours by the Russian security services, so the organization decided to continue working with each case individually.

Before embarking on the journey to pick up their child, a guardian must appeal to the Russian government structure under Lvova-Belova, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner under war crimes indictment. Russia has denied previous attempts to retrieve kidnapped children in which guardians had not properly applied for reunification. However, even preliminary approval of documents does not mean that everything will go smoothly. Darya describes the case of a 14-year-old boy who was turned over to his sister, but at the Russian-Ukrainian border, it turned out that Russia had already issued the boy a Russian passport, which he did not even know about, and Russian customs officers refused to let the family with Ukrainian documents through. They had to get new ones, in accordance with Russian legislation. The Russians have been forcing Russian citizenship upon kidnapped Ukrainian children since Vladimir Putin issued a decree to that effect in May 2022, so this situation is common. Darya says that the Russians are eager to find fault with any little thing in order to obstruct the process of reunification. One time, they simply did not like a tattoo on one woman's back, so they deported her and left her unable to bring back her child.

There have been cases where a child's parents have been killed, and either former neighbors or deported children themselves have contacted the organization.

After a child’s return, SOS Children's Villages Ukraine continues to support them in accordance with their needs. Many returnees need psychological help. Many also experience learning problems due to all the schooling they have missed, so the organization provides them with tutors. SOS Children’s Villages Ukraine also helps with basic things like clothes and shoes. Children who do not have parents or other relatives to take care of them are especially vulnerable.

Before the start of The Way Home project, SOS Children's Villages Ukraine, in partnership with the Ministry of Reintegration, was able to bring home 84 children. You can help the organization by following this link.

In 2023, children were returned home by the Ukrainian Child Rights Network in cooperation with the Ministry for Reintegration and with the support of the international humanitarian organization Save the Children in Ukraine and their supporters from all over the world as part of The Way Home and the Children UA: a Return Mission projects.

As of January 12, 2024, 143 children have been returned/reunified with their families through the joint efforts of these organizations.

Save Ukraine: targeted by the FSB and Moscow's lies

The charity organization Save Ukraine is headed by Mykola Kuleba, the former Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children's Rights (2014-2021). The organization works similarly to its peers – figuring out logistics, assisting with documents and finances for travel to Russia, and providing remote guidance to guardians as they go to retrieve their children.

For a long time, Save Ukraine employees tried to keep their work hidden from Russian authorities, but over time, this became impossible. A group of 13 guardians was interrogated by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) employees for more than 12 hours in a Moscow airport without access to food or water. One elderly woman died from the mistreatment. Save Ukraine had to find a way to inform her granddaughter, who was waiting to be taken home. The organization later found another person to bring the girl back, but Russian authorities relocated her and refused to provide information on her whereabouts. The search is still ongoing.

At one point, a mother mentioned the organization which helped her while under interrogation. After that, the Russians created a propaganda story about a "business for removing children" allegedly organized by Save Ukraine. In this story, the Security Service of Ukraine hired the organization to pay the parents for interviews in order to smear Russia. Russian propagandists claimed that Ukrainian children were being sold to childless European families, to pedophiles, or to black market organ dealers.

After this incident, Save Ukraine also abandoned group trips and started working with families individually. They also carefully prepare guardians for the trip to Russia, checking their phones for any evidence of pro-Ukrainian sentiment, examining body tattoos, and painstakingly explaining safety rules so that the Russians have no reason to detain and deport the guardians. However, situations are different. According to Save Ukraine representative Myroslava Kharchenko, at one point a mother who went to temporarily-occupied Kherson Oblast was first allowed to see her child, but was then interrogated for a day at the police station. The next day, she was blindfolded and taken to jail, where she was interrogated with a polygraph for hours while her child did not know where her mother had gone. During the interrogation, a Russian security service officer showed her a photo of a Save Ukraine employee secretly taken in public transport. This gives Save Ukraine reason to fear that the FSB has a dossier on almost all the organization’s staff.

Save Ukraine documents guardians’ testimonies about the circumstances of deportation, which represents one type of crime. After children are returned, the organization talks with them, age permitting, and documents their testimony about efforts Russia made to hinder their repatriation or to destroy their Ukrainian identity, which is another type of crime that indicates the genocidal nature of Russian policy. These testimonies, collected and processed together with Ukrainian law enforcement agencies of Ukraine, will be handed over to the International Criminal Court.

Thanks to the efforts of Save Ukraine, 223 children have already returned home. You can support their work here.

Prospects of return and increasing pressure

Darya Kasyanova emphasizes that Ukraine is unfortunately neither the first nor last country to face the problem of forced displacement of children during war. In her opinion, this is a gap in modern international humanitarian law that needs to be rectified. Kasyanova advocates for the return of Ukrainian children at the international level, and is convinced that Ukraine’s European partners understand the scale of the problem and consider the deportation of Ukrainian children and the events in the temporarily occupied territories to be criminal and genocidal acts. This is why they are providing assistance. However, the pace of returns and the targeted policy of the aggressor state at all levels require increased efforts at the international level and stronger pressure on Russia to return all Ukrainian children home as soon as possible.