Vitaly Saenko17:55, 30.10.23

The Russians are trying to destroy the dignity of Ukrainian children in filtration camps.

The Russian Federation is carrying out the most massive scenario of abduction of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories.

As an UNIAN correspondent reports, this was discussed during a round table meeting on the topic: “Deported Ukrainians in the so-called “temporary accommodation centers” – place of stay or New Camps?”

The Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights and Children’s Rehabilitation, Daria Gerasimchuk, said that the Russians are pursuing a planned genocidal policy against Ukrainians, and that these are not chaotic actions. In Russian filtration camps, not only Ukrainian prisoners of war and adult civilians, but also children undergo the humiliation of human dignity.

“Their will is also broken. Their consciousness is also broken, and they are immediately shown that they are absolutely nobody. They are also forced, during filtering and inspection, to undress and give up all their personal belongings, mobile phones,” Gerasimchuk said. 

She noted that Russians, under conditions of filtration measures, do not give any answers to Ukrainian children to any questions about their parents if families are forcibly separated, and do not say where the children are being transported.

“A child caught in a filtration event is generally deprived of dignity. They immediately try to break her,” Gerasimchuk emphasized and added that we are talking about absolute evil.

Separately, she said that when the Russians deport Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation from the occupied Ukrainian territories, in many cases the parents do not sign any documents at all to provide permission to remove the children. Ukrainians under occupation are deprived of access to objective information and do not have humanitarian corridors to travel to the free territory of Ukraine. Parents are forced to draw up Russian documents, including for their children.

“Everything that happened in the conditions of the temporarily occupied territory – in theory, it cannot be by consent,” she said. After taking Ukrainian children to camps supposedly for rehabilitation, the Russians then do not return the children to their parents. 

According to her, the Russian Federation follows a clearly developed step-by-step methodology and implements the most widespread scenario of child abduction.

Russia deliberately and knowingly abducts Ukrainian children

In turn, the representative of the Commissioner for the Rights of Children, Family, Youth and Sports, Irina Suslova, said that after the forced movement of Ukrainians to filtration camps, the Russians committed another crime – they transported Ukrainians deeper into the territory of the Russian Federation to the so-called temporary accommodation centers, where they take away and destroy Ukrainian documents, carry out forced Russian passporting, and force parents to immediately enroll their Ukrainian children in Russian schools for Russification.

“Children without parental care and children who are institutional – they are trying to place them under guardianship or remove them,” Suslova said.

She emphasized that Russia deliberately and consciously takes all actions to transport Ukrainian children from one ethnic group to another.

“As a rule, temporary accommodation centers are a place for re-education of children and transfer to another national group,” Suslova emphasized.

The children who managed to return to Ukraine noted that the Russians put very strong pressure on them, tried to Russify them and tell them that “Ukraine does not exist.”

(C)UNIAN 2023