The Russian Federation continues to implement a policy aimed at the forcible transfer of children to the Russian national group. These actions contain elements of the crime of genocide set forth in Article 2 (e) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, reproduced in Article 6 (e) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This policy has several dimensions:
– forcible transfer of children to Russian families, of which 400 minor Ukrainians became victims in 2022;
– “re-education” and indoctrination of Ukrainian children in recreation camps;
– medical examinations of minors from the newly occupied territories with further indefinite deportation to the Russian Federation.
Among the 307 children returned to Ukraine, the majority were taken away by agents of the Russian Federation under the pretext of recreation in camps. In 2022, according to the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, at least 6,000 children were victims of the relevant policy and were placed for “re-education” in 43 institutions in occupied Crimea and on the territory of the Russian Federation. It should be noted that the “head of the Republic of Crimea,” Serhiy Aksyonov announced plans to accept the 5,000 children only during the summer season and exclusively on the territory of the annexed peninsula. In addition, at least 2,000 children, mainly from the so-called DPR/LPR, were taken to camps and sanatoriums in Belarus4. Representatives of the so-called DPR claim that 18,000 children rested in the camps during 20225. Therefore, the number of affected minors is much higher. In this context, the information provided by the occupied international children’s center “Artek” about the plans to receive more than 41 thousand minors in 20236 is alarming because there is a high probability that children from the occupied territories of Ukraine will be among them. In any case, the estimated number of children taken to the camps is at least 20 times greater than the number of children repatriated to their homeland. There is no single legal mechanism to return the children from the occupied territories and the Russian Federation.
The full version of the analysis can be found in the attached document: