Evgenia Sokolenko15:52, 04/08/23

In a few hours, the little Ukrainians will arrive in Kyiv.

Today, April 8, 31 children deported by the Russian occupiers are returning to Ukraine .

Mykola Kuleba, the executive director of Save Ukraine, the representative of the President of Ukraine on children’s rights (2014-2021), announced this during the press conference . It is expected that they will be in the capital in a few hours.

“Now 31 children are on their way to Kyiv. These children will arrive in the capital in 3-4 hours. This was our 5th rescue mission, and it was special not only in terms of the number of children we saved, but also in terms of complexity. Unfortunately, the grandmother, who was supposed to pick up two children, died during this mission,” Kuleba said.

According to him, because of this, they managed to return not 33 children, but 31. Now it will be necessary to return the body of this woman and the children she was supposed to take back to Ukraine. The director of “Save Ukraine” emphasized the long-term and repeated interrogations by the FSB, and therefore “it is not surprising that the grandmother’s heart stopped.”

Kuleba said that the Russians did not allow parents and legal representatives to immediately enter the camp where Ukrainian children were kept.

“They (Russians – UNIAN) kept them behind the fence and let the parents one by one into the institution where cameras were installed. They pressured the parents to thank the Russian Federation for keeping their children before taking the child away,” – Kuleba said.

The Russians should identify the deported children and give the relevant lists to the Red Cross so that Ukraine can find their parents.

“All the children they returned say that no one tried in any way to find their parents. We were looking for these children, and it was very difficult, because there are children who changed 5 different places of stay in 5 months – they were abandoned from one camp to another. There is a lot of evidence of what happened to these children there,” said the executive director of Save Ukraine.

Currently, there are also data on 1.5 million Ukrainian children who, after 2014, ended up on the territory of Russia or in captured territories.

“This is almost 20% of the children’s population – we are talking about Crimea, Donbas, the occupied territories of other regions. And these are children who are hostages who, unfortunately, cannot return to Ukraine today for various reasons,” Kuleba concluded.

Deportation of Ukrainian children

As previously reported by UNIAN, Ukraine currently knows about 19,514 Ukrainian children illegally  deported to Russia . Among them are more than 4,000 orphans.

The fact of  the deportation of children  is a component of the crime of genocide and the removal of a part of the population for the purpose of assimilation, in this case the Ukrainian nation, is enough to qualify it as genocide.

Daria Gerasimchuk, the representative of the President of Ukraine on children’s rights, said that the Russian Federation  is abducting Ukrainian children in order to replenish its nation and make them Russians.

(C)UNIAN 2023