Russia has stolen 20,000 children from Ukraine. A country without its children is a country without a future
Oleksandra Matviichuk
June 05, 2024
National Post
This week, Canadians celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day – the day when Canada’s armed forces joined with those of the United Kingdom, the United States and other allies to start the liberation of Western Europe from fascist occupation. Today, my home country of Ukraine is partly under occupation by a new European fascist regime — that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine is one of the most devastating wars — in human and physical destruction — since the Second World War.
For 10 years, as a human rights lawyer, I have been documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine — for this war did not begin in 2022. It started with the invasion of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014.
Our team, the Center for Civil Liberties, united with dozens of organizations from across Ukraine to build a national network of documenters. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022 alone, we have recorded more than 72,000 war crimes.
Russia’s troops are destroying residential buildings, churches, schools, museums and hospitals. They are shooting at evacuation corridors. They are torturing people in filtration camps. They are forcibly mobilizing Ukrainians into the Russian army. They have banned the Ukrainian language and culture. They are abducting, robbing, raping and killing throughout the occupied territories in a savagery unimaginable for a modern and developed society.
Russia uses war crimes as a method of warfare — to break people’s resistance and occupy the country with the tool or warcraft I call “immense pain on the civilian population.” We are documenting more than just violations of the Geneva or Hague conventions. We are documenting human pain. Human suffering.
One of the heinous crimes we have witnessed is the forcible deportation of Ukrainians to change the demographic composition of the country. Crimea is a test site where Russia is conducting an experiment to integrate the occupied territory. The components of this experiment are the forced imposition of Russian citizenship, the substitution of the Ukrainian population, and organized repression to impose a systematic feeling of social inferiority.
Immediately after occupying Crimea, Russia started to displace the active part of the population from the peninsula and replace it with Russian citizens. To illustrate: Sevastopol’s population has grown by more than 17 per cent since the invasion, despite the outflow of those forced to flee — particularly Crimean Tatars.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has organized a campaign of forcible deportation of children. Russian law allows not only the forced adoption of such children, but also permits changing the children’s names and year and place of birth. This makes tracking the abducted youngsters tremendously difficult.
This crime is widespread and systematic. Russia has stolen 20,000 children from Ukraine. To put it in perspective, if one Ukrainian child were returned each day, it would take more than 54 years to get them all back. This is what led to the international arrest warrants being issued by the International Criminal Court for Putin and his “child rights commissioner” Maria Lvova-Belova.
This campaign illustrates the genocidal intent at the heart of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is a deliberate attempt to erase the very concept of Ukrainian nationhood — something Putin has repeatedly stated publicly. He says Ukraine is a myth, an illusion, and that it must cease to exist.
Earlier this year, Canada announced the co-establishment of the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children. I welcome this, but mostly for the recognition and profile it helps bring to this crisis. There are no real tools yet to bring the children back. And only a few hundred have been returned so far. This represents only a tiny fraction of Ukraine’s “stolen children.”
Ukrainian children abducted by Russia during its assault on their country are sharing the stories of their captivity with Canadian parliamentarians, in hopes they will help rescue others.
Canada can take a leading role in creating internationally co-ordinated mechanisms to harmonize sanctions regarding the deportation, forcible transfer and unjustifiable delay in the repatriation of Ukrainian children. At the very least, this can be done by the membership of the international coalition.
We must also facilitate the adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution on the legal mechanism for the return of Ukrainian children and urge the UN’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict to grant the status of “abducted child” to all displaced Ukrainian children until their identity, origin, and legal status can be verified through multilateral processes.
A country without its children is a country without a future. The Kremlin knows this. We must recognize it as well, and bring the international community together to end this act of cultural genocide against Ukraine.
Oleksandra Matviichuk is the president of the Center for Civil Liberties In Ukraine. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 on behalf of the centre for their work in investigating Russian war crimes.