Ajit Karn
Children in Ukraine are at the heart of the Putin’s arrest warrant
In its arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president of committing the war crime of illicit deportation of people, specifically minors, from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The International Criminal Court issued a separate arrest warrant for Maria Aleksandrovna Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights.
Moscow rejected the move on Friday, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov describing the allegations as “outrageous.” Since its invasion in February of last year, Russia has repeatedly denied that its forces have committed atrocities and rejected allegations that Ukrainians were illegally relocated.
The Ukrainian government has provided the following facts and figures regarding this matter:
– In an interview with Reuters on March 17, Daria Herasymchuk, Advisor-Commissioner to the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights and Rehabilitation, detailed the five primary methods she believes Russia has used to unlawfully transfer Ukrainian children.
They consist of:
Offering families in occupied areas the opportunity to send their children on vacation to Russian children’s programmes and not returning them within the agreed-upon time frame.
removing Ukrainian infants from care facilities in occupied territories;
Separating children from their parents at filtration checkpoints – locations where Ukrainians from occupied regions are screened and processed before being permitted to enter Russia.
Removing parental rights through the enforcement of laws in occupied territories;
Taking children away from adults who were caring for them after their parents were murdered in battle.
– On March 17, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin stated that prosecutors were investigating the deportation of over 16,000 minors from Russian-occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions. “However, the actual number could be much higher,” Kostin wrote on his Facebook page.
Officials report that Ukraine has returned 308 children thus far.
Iryna Vereshchuk, minister for the reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, issued a public appeal to Russian officials on Saturday, requesting a list of all Ukrainian orphans and children whose parents’ parental rights were revoked and are currently in occupied Ukrainian territory or were illegally transferred to Russia.
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– According to a report published in February by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health as part of the Conflict Observatory, Russia has detained at least 6,000 Ukrainian children, and likely many more, in sites in Russian-controlled Crimea and Russia whose primary purpose appears to be political re-education. According to the report, Yale University researchers have identified at least 43 camps and other facilities that have held Ukrainian minors as part of a “large-scale systematic network” administered by Moscow.
