A policy defended at the highest level of the State in Russia supervises these deportations.
by Emmanuel Grynszpan
The Russian authorities remove, retain and “rehabilitate” thousands of Ukrainian children caught in the turmoil of war. At the end of the process, part of the children are issued Russian citizenship and are placed in Russian host families. These acts, considered as a whole, constitute a “war crime,” said a UN commission of inquiry on Thursday, March 16.
The Ukrainian authorities frequently describe as genocide the actions carried out by Russia, but the United Nations commission of inquiry, chaired by the Norwegian judge Erik Mose, has not reached the conclusion that Russia leads to Ukraine a specifically genocidal policy in the legal sense of the term. The UN Commission noted that the deportation to Russia concerns children who have lost their parents or who temporarily lost contact with them during hostilities. These are also children who were separated after one of their parents was placed in detention.
What is accused of the Russian authorities is due to the fact that the latter refuse to take into account the opinion of the parents, relatives or tutors of these children. Russia also refrains from returning them to Ukraine or hinders their return. “Parents or legal tutors and children are faced with many obstacles to restore contact, reach family reunification and send children to Ukraine,” said the UN report.
” Patriotic rehabilitation “
A network of at least 40 camps across the country is used for the “patriotic rehabilitation” of young victims, where the love of Russia must be instilled in them and the detestation of the Western world, according to the results of ‘A survey published in February by the Conflict Observatory, a group of researchers from Yale University in the United States. This study established that at least 6,000 Ukrainian minors have lived for weeks, even months, in these camps, cut off from their parents.
According to official Ukrainian statistics, on March 13, 366 children are missing and 16,226 were deported to Russia. The number of children cannot be counted with accuracy due to the ongoing hostilities and the temporary occupation of part of the Ukrainian territory. Erik Mose declared at a press conference that the UN commission on Ukraine had studied in detail the cases of 164 children, aged 4 to 18, evacuated from the regions of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Kherson . The defender of Ukrainian rights, Dmytro Lubinets, confirms, for his part, to the world that the Russian authorities refuse to communicate the names of the deported Ukrainian children.
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