Russia's open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian is well underway, in one of the most explosive issues of the war, an AP investigation shows. Thousands of children have been found in the basements of war-torn cities like Mariupol and at orphanages in the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donbas. They include those whose parents were killed by Russian shelling as well as others in institutions or with foster families, known as "children of the state." Russia claims that these children don't have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can't be reached. But officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren't wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship.
Raising the children of war in another country or culture can be a marker of genocide, an attempt to erase the identity of an enemy nation. Prosecutors say it also can be tied directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has explicitly supported the adoptions. "It's not something that happens spur of the moment on the battlefield," said Stephen Rapp, a former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who is advising Ukraine on prosecutions. "And so your ability to attribute responsibility to the highest level is much greater here." Even when parents are dead, Rapp said, their children must be sheltered, fostered, or adopted in Ukraine rather than deported to Russia. Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children. But in May, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Russia to adopt and give citizenship to Ukrainian children without parental care—and harder for Ukraine and relatives to win them back.
Russia has a register of suitable Russian families for Ukrainian children and pays them for each child who gets citizenship—up to $1,000 for those with disabilities. It holds summer camps for Ukrainian orphans, offers "patriotic education" classes, and even runs a hotline to pair Russian families with children from Donbas. "It is absolutely a terrible story," said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor, who claims hundreds of children were taken from that city alone. "We don't know if our children have an official parent or (stepparents) or something else because they are forcibly disappeared by Russian troops." The picture is complicated by the fact that many children in Ukraine's so-called orphanages are not orphans at all, per the AP. Ukraine's government acknowledged to the UN before the war that most children of the state "are not orphans, have no serious illness or disease and are in an institution because their families are in difficult circumstances."
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It's hard to pin down the exact number of Ukrainian children deported to Russia—Ukrainian officials claim nearly 8,000. Russia hasn't given a total. This has happened before. In 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, more than 80 children from Luhansk were stopped at checkpoints and abducted. Ukraine sued, and the European Court of Human Rights found the children were taken into Russia "without medical support or the necessary paperwork." They were returned to Ukraine before a final decision. Kira, a 12-year-old girl who saw her father shot and killed, was evacuated from Mariupol to Donetsk with shrapnel wounds. She was reunited with her grandparents only after the office of the Ukraine deputy prime minister got involved. Her grandmother, Svitlana Obedynska, said Kira had become withdrawn, and negotiations were difficult. "It was not decided at our level," she said. "She wants to be with her family. After all, she has no one else."
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