🚨 According to experts from Yale University, at least 35,000 Ukrainian children are being held in russia or in territories temporarily occupied by it. Some were deported to military camps, orphanages, or handed over for adoption by russian families. Most remain unreachable, and efforts to return them have proven nearly futile.
Source: Bukvy
🚗 Mothers are forced to break through to occupied cities, cross the front lines, and endure humiliation to get their children back. As Natalia told The Guardian, her sons were held in a camp in Anapa, and the journey to bring them home took six days under shelling.
📉 However, her story is an exception. The Bring Kids Back initiative reports that only 1,366 children have been returned. The rest remain in a system that is nearly impossible to escape.
🛰️ Yale analysts confirm cases of deportation using satellite imagery, digital traces, and documentation. This campaign is being called the largest wartime child abduction since World War II. The executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab compares it to the Nazi Germanization policy.
🏴☠️ Testimonies from freed children are shocking: in the camps, they were forbidden to speak Ukrainian, forced to sing the russian anthem, undergo military training, and draw the tricolor. They were told their parents would be punished if they disobeyed.
⚖️ Since 2022, russia has allowed the adoption of abducted Ukrainian children. In cases where a child’s parents are killed or imprisoned, the child completely loses the possibility of returning home.
🎗️ “These are our people, our children — and these are our territories too,” said Ksenia, a volunteer with the “Helping to Evacuate” initiative, emphasizing that the return of children is a key condition for Ukraine in international negotiations.
🔗 In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for putin and russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, lvova-belova, for the deportation of Ukrainian children — officially recognized as a war crime.
🎯 As noted by Nathaniel Raymond, russia has shifted its tactic: from hiding the abductions to using Ukrainian children as leverage on the international stage.
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