Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian President Vladimir Putin is a wanted man. Not only for the alleged war crimes Ukraine has been accusing him of, but also his suspected role in the “unlawful deportation and transfer” of children from Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia, according to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) heard a case concerning 10 Ukrainian children who were forcibly transferred from Crimea after Russia’s 2014 annexation and put up for adoption.
The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union (UHHRU), which lodged the case, argued that Russian nationality was imposed on the children who were taken from childcare institutions. The group says that as there has been no information on their whereabouts since 2014, despite the Ukrainian authorities’ repeated requests, this amounts to enforced disappearance. Ahead of the hearing, the special envoy of the Council of Europe Secretary General said it is a reminder that “we must keep Ukrainian children at the heart of the political agenda”.
We must not stop asking questions and demanding answers,” said envoy Thordis Kolbrun Reykfjord Gylfadottir. In total, four Ukrainian human rights and journalistic groups accuse Moscow of violating the international Convention on the Rights of the Child, levelling various charges including deporting children, illegal adoption and changing children’s identities and nationalities. The change of identity, including their first and last names and even dates of birth, is the reason “very little is known about these (10) children – or about such children in general,” Onysiia Syniuk of the Zmina rights group told Al Jazeera.
The children in Tuesday’s case were between one and five years old in 2014, and were given to Russian families for adoption, according to Denys Chistikov, one of the top Ukrainian officials dealing with affairs on the occupied Black Sea peninsula. Moscow in 2014 created the Train of Hope Crimea, a controversial adoption programme that showed “video profiles” of children on Kremlin-run television networks to facilitate their adoption or transfer to Russian orphanages, he said. Observers say the children became part of a narrative for Crimea’s “return to the motherland” and against Ukraine.
The alleged practice continued and widened after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the partial occupation of several Ukrainian regions. Russian officials reject the accusations, claiming that children have not been abducted but are rather rescued from war zones through humanitarian efforts. Over the years, Ukrainian children are said to have been taken from orphanages and boarding schools and sent to “summer camps” in Crimea for months, and then relocated to orphanages or foster families in Russia.
Chistikov said many have been sent to “specially prepared settings” where “Russia’s occupation policies” are justified. They enter Russia’s school system, where the Kremlin has introduced classes on the reasons for Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s campaign to “restore traditional values”. According to rights groups and teachers who have fled Russia, schoolchildren are made to sing the Russian anthem and declare Ukraine a “terrorist state” as they are taught that the collective West instigated the war.
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