Mother and her young son are now in Kharkiv. Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets reported this.

A woman and her newborn son, residents of Lyptsi village in Kharkiv region, who were illegally taken to Russia, have been returned to Ukraine. Now the family is staying in Kharkiv.

The woman turned to the Ombudsman’s Office for help in May 2023 and asked for assistance in obtaining a child’s certificate and returning to the territory of Ukraine.

“As it turned out, before the outbreak of full-scale war, the family lived in Liptsi, Kharkiv region. Russian occupants entered their village on the first day of the invasion – February 24. On March 16 this year, the occupation authorities forcibly deported the family to the Voronezh region, blatantly violating all human and civil rights,” the statement notes.

The woman was promptly issued all the necessary documents, but she and her son were repeatedly stopped at the border by Russians. Nevertheless, on June 18, the Liptsy residents came back home.

Deportation to Belarus

Starting from June 15, Ukrainian human rights activists have been recording that the Russian Federation has been taking Ukrainian children to Belarus, said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, during a briefing.

At first, the Russian military took children from the so-called LPR and DPR, now such cases are observed in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region and partially occupied Kherson region.

Currently, there are four available places of detention of Ukrainian children – three in the Minsk region (including the Dubrava camp) and one in the Gomel region. According to Kateryna Rashevska, 100 and 400 children are taken to the so-called camps daily.

There are also cases when children are transferred to other families in Russia, changing their data, which delays the process of identifying and turning them back to Ukraine. According to Children of War, only 373 children have been returned to their Ukrainian families.

See also

Russia deported 561 Ukrainian children from Kharkiv region. Along with children, there are about 1,007 cases of forced deportation of civilians. Within the criminal proceedings, all of them are registered as missing persons.

Monument to children killed as a result of Russian aggression unveiled in Kharkiv. The memorial features sculptures of a boy and a girl. Their figures rise above a granite block symbolizing an explosion. The children are depicted as angels with burnt wings.