Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Lyudmila Denysova said in a statement on Facebook that Russian military forces have now kidnapped 121,000 children to Russia. “Ukraine has no information on whether the children put up for adoption have the status of orphans or are deprived of parental care,” she wrote on her channel. The children are to be put up for adoption in Russia, according to Denysova. The Russian side is currently working on “enabling the accelerated procedure for the adoption of children from the Donbass”. “Russia is repeating the scenario of 2014, when it took Ukrainian children from occupied Crimea to Russia on the so-called ‘Train of Hope’ and put them up for adoption,” Denysova said.
She added that the Ukrainian authorities have no access to information about the kidnapped children. She called on the UN: “I call on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN Human Rights Committee and the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) to intervene to stop the illegal deportations of Ukrainian citizens from Ukraine and their subsequent illegal adoption to prevent the attacker’s territory. I ask the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.”
The first cases of abductions to Russia were reported in late March, when Pyotr Andryushenko, an assistant to the mayor of Mariupol, said that 4,000 to 4,500 Mariupol residents had been “forcibly” taken to the Russian city of Taganrog without their passports.
