Veronika Prokhorenko17:53, 07/18/232 minutes.167
Behind-the-scenes negotiations are conducted by two states.

Two countries of the world are secretly “fighting” for the return of Ukrainian children forcibly deported to the territory of the Russian Federation : behind-the-scenes discussions on this matter are being conducted by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

According to the Financial Times , Saudi Arabia raised the issue at the G20 meeting in Copenhagen in June. Details about the situation were reported to the publication by 4 diplomatic sources familiar with the negotiations.

According to one of the diplomats, at the meeting, Western leaders endorsed an initiative by Saudi Arabia to mediate the return of Ukrainian children, as well as other important issues, such as the grain deal and Russian nuclear threats.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia act as third parties to solve the problem with the return of the children of Ukraine, the publication indicates. 

The main difficulty lies in the fact that Ukraine and the Russian Federation refuse to conduct direct bilateral negotiations between themselves. It is also not known exactly how many children and where Russia took them:

“The goal is to count all the children in order to understand how many there are, and then find the best solution for each child,” the diplomat said. At the moment, the “mediation process” has reached a stage that has not been advertised before: Ukrainian and Russian officials are compiling lists with the names of thousands of children who were moved to Russia during the war in Ukraine. 

According to the interlocutors of the publication, negotiations on this matter are “extremely delicate” and have been ongoing for several months. Also, two FT sources say that Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich is participating in the negotiation process (he had previously acted as an intermediary party between Moscow and Kiev). 

The European Parliament called for the arrest of Lukashenko due to the deportation of the children of Ukraine

Recall, on July 18, members of the European Parliament called on the International Criminal Court of The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko because of his role in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. 

On March 17, the court issued similar warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Tatyana Moskalkova. As of May 2023, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky specified that the Putin regime had deported at least 19,393 children to Russia . These are the children whose names are known to Ukraine.

(C)UNIAN 2023