They reveal how thousands of Ukrainian boys are illegally “adopted” in Russia

With open arms and the smile of a kindergarten teacher, Maria Lvova-Belova, presidential commissioner for children’s rights in Russia, gets off a plane belonging to Vladimir Putin’s defense ministry surrounded by about 120 Ukrainian children. “Welcome to Russia!”he tells them as he plunges them into a tunnel of helium balloons. They are joined by men and women who will be the future guardians or adoptive parents of the newcomers.

The scene is part of one of the Russian propaganda videos through which the Kremlin Try to pretend he’s saving those girls and boys from the fear of war and who will protect them by giving them a new family.

However, many of those children who were born and raised in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine – such as Donetsk, Donbas or Lugansk – have it but have been separated from their own.

What it was checked the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in collaboration with the public televisions of some of the countries that make it up: Spain (RTVE), France (FTV), Italian Switzerland (RSI), Ukraine (PBC) and Finland (YLE).

Ukraine claims that, since the beginning of the war, some 16,000 boys were forcibly deported from Russia, assured this Wednesday in Strasbourg the vice-president of the European Commission for values ​​and transparency, Vera Joruová. And that only 361 managed to return to Ukraine.

Because this Wednesday the European Parliament debated the allegations against Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights Fror committing alleged war crimes smuggling hundreds of children into Russia.

Precisely for this reason, the International Criminal Court ordered the arrest of Putin and Lvova-Belova in the middle of last month. The court in The Hague finds that the Russian president “bears criminal responsibility” because he committed those crimes or because he failed to “exercise adequate control over the civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts”.

Putin, however, has not moved a hair. Russia has not signed the Treaty of Rome, the cradle of the International Criminal Court, so the decisions of this court do not affect it.

How the research was done

“We found an immense volume of content in official Russian sources and Maria Lvova-Belova’s networks. Also in the accounts of the governor of Moscow, Andrey Vorobyov, and in the networks of the regional governments of the occupied areas of Donbass, Lugansk and Donetsk”, he says clarion Belén López Garrido, editor of the EBU News Service and project manager of the European Network of Investigative Journalism.

“We were able to verify that hundreds of Ukrainian children were forcibly relocated to Russia from the territories occupied by the Kremlin’s troops”, says RTVE, the Spanish public broadcaster which at the end of February dedicated a program of its Weekly Report to investigations into the media consortium.

“These are children who were in orphanages, children separated from their parents by the war or children whose parents sent them to summer camps to get them out of the war situation and who then did not return when they should have returned,” explains López Garrido. . .

“We have also seen that Putin, after the invasion, passed a law very quickly give him Russian nationality these children and thus facilitate their adoption by Russian citizens”, comments the director of the EBU News Service.

“They showed it as propaganda but it’s evidence, as the International Criminal Court has now stated,” he adds. Evidence of a war crime What is forced population transfer? The United Nations had already come out to say that Russian nationality could not be given to those children.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, was clear in his statements on the point: “Russia is violating the fundamental principles of child protection in wartime by giving Ukrainian children Russian passports and give them up for adoptionGrandi said.

“We realized that apart from personal stories, many of which were terrible, what was here was something much bigger and that it was being done at the state level in a systematic way,” says López Garrido.

Robbery

“And that Putin, as he said, was not going to stop because, for them, this is a wartime evacuation of Russian children and what they are doing is saving them. Of course, the Ukrainian version is very different: They are your children and they are being stolen. They have no way to recover them. They don’t have the identities they appear under or any kind of document that claims them,” he complains.

The investigation was able to verify, however, that those parents or grandparents who managed to find the “adequate” children managed to recover them.

“The children are in foster homes, some have been adopted, some are in centers called summer camps and it does not appear that the Russian government has any intention of returning them. It is true that we have been able to verify that in those cases where Ukrainian parents find out where these children are, plant themselves in Russia and claim them, the Russians return them, ”she specifies.

With a clarification: “This requires having the means and making a journey which, at this moment, passes through several open battlefronts and across different countries. Many parents and grandparents did. But they represent a small percentage of Ukrainian children who are in Russia,” López Garrido points out.

This Wednesday, in the European Parliament, the Vice-President of the European Commission for Values ​​and Transparency Joruová deemed the collaboration to provide further evidence “crucial”: “We remain committed to all efforts to ensure that those responsible for the crimes of illegal forced deportation or of the transfer of Ukrainian children into account, and that Ukrainian children return safely to their families”.