Ukraine says Russia took 20,000 children during war. Will some be returned? | Russia-Ukraine War News

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing criminal charges of “illegal deportation and transfer of children.”

This is the order of arrest warrant in 2023 by the International Criminal Court, the intergovernmental tribunal based in the Hague.

On June 2, when negotiations on the cessation of fire were ignited, Ukrainian diplomats handed over their Russian colleagues a list of hundreds of children, who were said to have been taken from the Ukrainian Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia.

The return of these children “can become the first test for the sincerity of (Russia) intentions” to achieve a peaceful settlement, Andry Jermak, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski, Andry Jermak, told media. “The ball is in the corner of Russia.”

But Ukraine claims that the number of children taken from Russia is much greater. Kiev has so far identified 19,546 children, who are said to have been forcibly taken from Russia's Ukrainian regions from 2022.

The list can be far from the final, as Ukrainian officials believe that some children have lost their parents during hostilities and cannot contact their relatives in Ukraine.

By the beginning of June, only 1345 children had returned home to Ukraine.

But why did Russia take them first?

“The goal is the genocide of the Ukrainian people through Ukrainian children,” Daria Herasimchuk, presidential adviser on children's rights, told Al Jazeera. “Everyone understands that if you take away children from a nation, the nation will not exist.”

Putin, his allies and the Kremlin -backed media, insist that Ukraine is an “artificial state” without cultural and ethnic identity.

Russian employees who run orphans, foster homes and facilitate adoption are accused of changing the names of Ukrainian children to deprive them of access to relatives.

“The Russians do absolutely everything to erase the identity of the children,” Herasimchuk said.

The reading project, a global team of journalists and lawyers, documenting, published and building cases of alleged war crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine, said the “indoctrination” is being played.

“The system is in the aspects of indoctrination, the re -education of the children, when they are deprived of a certain identity they had in Ukraine, and another identity, Russian, are imposed on them,” Victoria Novikova, a senior researcher of the reporting project.

Russia's ultimate goal is to “turn their enemy, Ukrainians, into their friend, so that these children think that Ukraine is an enemy so that (Russia) can take all Ukraine,” she said.

A group of researchers at Yale University, which helps to find the children, agree that the alleged abductions “can represent war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Moscow is conducting a “systematic campaign for violently moving children from Ukraine in Russia, destroying their connection with Ukrainian language and heritage through” re -education “and even excludes children from their Ukrainian identity through adoption,” said the Humanitarian Research Laboratory of the Jale School of Public Health.

The group has deployed about 8,400 children in five dozen facilities in Russia and Belarus, the closest ally of Moscow.

In 2022, Sergei Mironov, head of Just Russia, Pro-Kremlin Party, accepted a 10-month-old girl named Marharyta Prokopenko, according to the online magazine Vaznye istorii.

The girl was taken from an orphanage in the southern Ukrainian city of Herson, which was occupied at the time. Her name has been changed to Marina Mironova, the magazine reports.

The girl's name is on the list on June 2.

The alleged abductions are far from “chaotic” and follow detailed scenarios, Herasimchuk said.

She said some children were taken by parents who refuse to cooperate with Moscow -installed “administrations” in areas occupied in Russia.

During this filtering procedure, she claims that Russian intelligence and military officers and Ukrainian associates questioned and “torment” parents by checking their bodies for pro-Ukrainian tattoos or bruises left by withdrawing a firearm.

Victoria Obilina, a 29-year-old military nurse who has been imprisoned after failing to have a “filtration” that followed the siege of the southern town of Maripol, is afraid of such abduction.

She also thought that her daughter Alice, who was four at the time, would witness her torment and then end up in a Russian orphanage.

“They could have tormented me close to her, or could they torment her to make me do things,” Ovilina to say Al Jazeera after her release from Russian captivity in September 2022.

Instead, she decided to hand over Alice to a completely unknown, civilian woman who had already undergone the filtration process and got on a bus that took 10 days endless stops and checks against the background of firing and shooting to reach a controlled area.

Another supposed method is a “summer camping” in which children in Russia occupied in Russia are taken to Crimea or Russian cities along the Black Sea coast and do not return to their parents, says Herasimchuk.

Some parents immerse themselves in the abyss to try to reach Russia to return their children.

But very few succeed, as Ukrainians who are trying to enter Russia are often banned from re -entering.

Attempts to return a child are “always a lottery,” Herasimchuk said.

Pre -school children often do not remember their addresses and do not know how to reach their relatives while teens are more inventive, she said.

Ukrainian boys are particularly vulnerable as they are regarded as future soldiers who could fight against Ukraine, she said.

“All the boys undergo militarization, they receive summonses from the Russian cabinets for summons so that they become Russian soldiers and return to Ukraine,” she said.

Return is often more essential through a third nation as QatarWhose government helped do dozens of children back home.

On Wednesday, the children's rights of Russia Ombudswoman said it had received the list of 339 Ukrainian children. She denied that Russia was abducted tens of thousands of children.

“We see that there are no 20,000-25,000 children; the list contains only 339 (names) and we will work carefully for every child,” Maria Lvova-Belova told the TAS Agency.

In 2022, Lvova-Belova adopted a 15-year-old boy from Ukraine Maripol.

Along with Putin, she is I wanted by the International Criminal Court for her role in the alleged abductions.

Ukrainian observers hope that the return of children can be one of the few positive things that will come out of the stagnant peace talks in Ukraine-Russia, which were last held in Istanbul of Turkie.

“After everyone realizes that Istanbul does not discuss the cessation of fire, the Ukrainian side is trying to get things away from the humanitarian path,” Vyacheslav Lihachiov told Al Jazeera.