UKRAINE, Aug 8 — Russians created an online catalog that offers Ukrainian children to choose for adoption, said Mykola Kuleba, the head of the human rights organization Save Ukraine.

Kuleba said that Russia published the profiles of illegally deported children from occupied territories in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea. Since 2014, they have been systematically taking Ukrainian children away from there at the request of Russian families from Moscow and other regions of the country.

The activist said that demand for children has fallen within Russia, so they have created a new way to improve their system with methods that look like child trafficking.

The “catalogue” has children’s profiles with photos, noting their age, behaviour, and the details of their appearances.

“They describe children as goods: obedient, calm, etc.,” said Kuleba.

Most children in the “catalogue” were born in the Luhansk region before the Russian full-scale invasion and had Ukrainian citizenship, Kuleba says. In some cases, Russians killed their parents and made Russian documents to legalize kidnapping.

“When Russia demands (Ukraine) to provide a list of Ukrainian children that were stolen, they could just look at the database at the website of the (so-called) “Ministry of Education” of Luhansk region,” he said.

On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an international arrest order for Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. They are accused of illegal deportation of Ukrainian adults and children from Ukraine to Russia.

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