Around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to Russia. Occasionally 5 or 10 children have been exchanged between Russia and Ukraine but most have not. Most are re-educated, forcibly adopted into Russian or Belarusian families and obstacles are created to prevent their return to Ukraine and reunification with their parents.

They were subject to anti-Ukraine indoctrination, military training, and punishment for questioning the war

Russian President Vladimir Putin has enacted laws to enable this to continue.

Putin’s friend Donald Trump has stopped funding Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab and prevented the Lab from accessing the data they had collected since 2022 on the complicity of Russian and Belarusian officials at all levels. The Lab had tracked thousands of children whose identities and whereabouts Russia refused to share and now the US government is doing the same.

Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, are accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Ukrainian MP for Servant of the People party Yelyzaveta Yasko, graduate of Oxford University broadcast by BBC World Service on 19 March 2025 in the Newsday programme.

She talked about the effect on her daughter of the sirens which sound every night. Her daughter is scared and cries. When she is in the nursery during the day the children have to go into a shelter when the sirens sound. They do not have their afternoon nap or it is disrupted. This is the reality of Ukrainian children’s lives. They need security which is absolutely lacking now in daily life in Ukraine.

Yelyzaveta (Lisa) Yasko is a graduate of the University of Oxford.

More Information on Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia

Briefing by European Parliament Think Tank

Trump Administration Shutters Research Lab Tracking Stolen Ukrainian Children

Wikipedia article: Child abductions in the Russo-Ukrainian War

This page is part of the Children and War Project.