There are now 700,000 children in Russia who were removed from Ukraine from the war zone, the head of the International Committee of the Federation Council, Grigory Karasin, said in Telegram on July 2.
As Karasin wrote, many children were taken away with their parents, and children from orphanages were taken away with their caregivers.
Ukraine and a number of Western countries accuse Russia of deporting children from Russian-occupied territories. In the fall of 2022, Daria Herasymchuk, Ukrainian presidential commissioner for children’s rights, said that 11,000 parentless children had been illegally deported to Russia.
The U.S. State Department in its February report accused Russia of “illegal adoptions and deportations, which is a gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner, charging them with assisting in the “illegal removal of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation”.
As Kommersant wrote, according to Moscow’s version, the children were evacuated from dangerous areas; the Kremlin does not consider this a deportation. Kommersant quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as saying in June that five million Ukrainian refugees had entered Russia, more than 700,000 of them children.
The Foreign Minister noted that the Russian side did not conceal the names of the children taken to Russia and that all of them could return to their parents if they turned up.
