Ukraine. ICC prosecutor identified “hundreds of children” deported to Russia

Briton Karim Khan alleged that these acts of deportation of Ukrainian minors to Russia and their adoption by Russian families “demonstrate the intention to permanently remove these children from their own country”, an illegal act contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

The attorney general of the International Criminal Court (ICC) also said that such acts were committed in the context of “acts of aggression” by the Russian army against Ukraine.

The ICC today issued an arrest warrant against Putin and another directed at Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children, an action defined as a war crime.

A report on Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-education and Adoption of Children from Ukraine, released in February by the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health (HRL), estimates that more than 6,000 Ukrainian minors are placed in 43 Russian re-education camps or orphanages after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The report admits that the number could be much higher.

The non-governmental organization (NGO) Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates, in another report, that thousands of Ukrainian children living in orphanages were forcibly transferred to Russia or the occupied territories.