Irina Pogorelaya22:12, 05/31/24
The Ukrainian side first managed to take these children to Georgia.
Five deported orphans , whom the Russians first held in the occupied territory of Ukraine and then deported to the Russian Federation, were returned to Ukraine.
This was announced by the founder of the Save Ukraine organization Nikolai Kuleba. He said that all the returned children were pupils of the Novopetrovsky boarding school in the Nikolaev region.
For the first three months after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, children were on the front line, hiding from bombs and missiles in the basement, without food or water.
According to Kuleba, in July 2022, the children were found by Russians and transported at gunpoint to the occupied territory. “The children were kept in the Kherson Center for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation. Every day the military came to them and checked if anyone had suddenly escaped, they threatened them and forbade them to communicate with their relatives,” he said.
In the fall of 2022, the occupiers took them to the annexed Crimea, and from there to the city of Anapa, Krasnodar Territory. “It was from there that the children were rescued and taken… to Georgia,” Kuleba revealed the details.
He said that with the help of Save Ukraine, 356 children were returned from the Russian Federation, of which 90 were orphans.
5 deported orphans were returned to Ukraine from Russia
(C)UNIAN 2024
I wish the media would stop saying the children were “deported” because more accurately, they were abducted or kidnapped. Deported sounds more like a technical issue instead of a heinous war crime and act of genocide.
“Deported” is in itself a serious crime against humanity (art 6c Nuremberg), but you are right. By a bad choice of words or by diluting the messages, we are only reinforcing the genocidal violence carried out against the Ukrainian people and no longer allow us to have clear and effective doctrines to fight against this same violence.
What worries me in this case is the extremely low number of returns compared to all the kidnapped children. Unless I’m mistaken, nearly 20,000 children would be concerned?