Between 2022 and 2024, 42 children from the Kherson Region who had been under occupation since the first days of the full-scale invasion were placed in the care of Russian families.
This was reported by Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.
The information became known from the statements of the occupation administration in the Kherson Region. For a long time, the Russian authorities ignored the demands of the Ukrainian side to provide information about each deported and forcibly displaced child.
‘In particular, little was known about the children from the Kherson Regional Children's Home. In 2022, in order to save the children, the staff of the institution hid them in the basement of a church until they were found by the FSB,’ Lubinets said.
Despite the fact that most of these children had parents or other legal representatives, the Russians took them to the temporarily occupied Crimea to the Yalynka orphanage. After that, the profiles of some of the children began to appear in the Russian federal adoption database. It is known that 10 children from Kherson Region are currently in Yalynka, the ombudsman said.
‘Such actions are a gross violation of international law, Geneva Convention IV and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The deportation of Ukrainian children and their forced transfer to Russian families is a war crime for which the perpetrators must be held accountable!’ the Ombudsman said.
- It has become known from open sources that about 4,000 children from the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories were taken to study in the schools of the TOT of Crimea. Another 800 children from Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk and Luhansk Regions are enrolled in kindergartens there.