International community is asked to help return Ukrainian children deported to russia

The Foreign Minister of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba at the UN asks the international community to help return Ukrainian children deported to Russia.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has caused the worst human rights crisis in Europe since World War II, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at a special event at the UN headquarters initiated by Ukraine on gross human rights violations caused by Russia’s aggression.

“The most atrocious Russian crime is the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, their abduction from their families and guardians. We are talking about thousands, maybe tens of thousands of children,” said Dmytro Kuleba.

He emphasized that all levels of the Russian government are involved in the deportation of children, which constitutes the crime of genocide.

“This horror must be stopped, and all criminals involved must be held accountable. In order to stop it, all forces must be united. Governments, the international community, international organizations, NGOs, activists, media, experts and lawyers,” he emphasized.

It must be mentioned, that as of now, more than 7.5 million Ukrainian children have already suffered from the war, hundreds of thousands have been taken to Russia

So far 16,226 children have been identified, but the real number of children forcibly taken to the Russian Federation reaches hundreds of thousands, said Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights Daria Herasymchuk at a meeting with representatives of the Ukrainian community in New York. Only 307 children have been returned.

It has also been established that Russian troops have killed 461 children and wounded 920.

“During the war, I began to hate mornings, because in the morning I receive data on dead and wounded children,” she said, noting that there are no data from the occupied territories, and new mass graves are discovered when they are liberated.

The shocking truth is that due to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine’s latest data, Ukraine was able to return only about 300 children out of more than 16 thousand deported to Russia and Belarus for the past year. This was reported by Prosecutor General Andrey Kostin during a meeting with Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Duney Mijatovych.

“One of the most egregious crimes is the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and Belarus. In May 2022, Putin signed a decree on a simplified procedure for obtaining Russian citizenship for children from Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson,” the Prosecutor General noted.

According to the Prosecutor General, the deportation of more than 16,000 children has been confirmed today. It was possible to return 307 of them. To do more, the help of the international community is needed, Kostin added.

Ukraine Front Lines

Tags: russia ukraine war ukraine front lines Ukrainian children