UKRAINE, Dec 4 – There is new evidence that suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin and other high-ranking Russian officials are personally involved in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children, according to a December 3 report by the U.S. State Department and the Yale University Humanities Research Laboratory.

After the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia started deporting Ukrainian children to re-educate them and destroy their ties to national identity. The National Police informs that since the start of the all-out war, Russians have deported 9,683 children from the occupied territories of the Donetsk region, 1,514 from Zaporizhzhia, 947 from Luhansk, 137 from Kharkiv, 1,597 from Kherson, and one from Kyiv regions. 

According to the report, President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova are the “key figures” in the Russian deportation program. The analysts said that they jointly coordinate the actions of local administrations, law enforcement agencies, and social services to ensure the implementation of the Russian plan.

The report says that to deport the children, they probably used military transport aircraft that is under Putin’s personal control.

At the same time, one illegally deported child from Ukraine is currently under the personal care of Lvova-Belova, “which have become a symbol of the program.”

Russians militarize deported Ukrainians, issue them Russian documents, re-educate them, and host them in Russian families in an attempt to change their identity. 

Also, according to Dmytro Lubinets, the Council’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, there is evidence of torture and ill-treatment of children held in torture chambers in the temporarily occupied territories.

The Russian side officially states that there are more than 700,000 Ukrainian children on the territory of the Russian Federation. Ukraine has officially confirmed the deportation of more than 19,500. 

Ukrainian law enforcement officers are aware of more than 500 cases of deportation of children from the occupied territories of the Kharkiv region alone.

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