Yuri Kobzar18:46, 05/31/23

The deportation of Ukrainian children has become a source of income for “adoptive parents”.

Illegal “adoption” of kidnapped Ukrainian children has become for Russians a source of easy money for help from the state. As the journalists of the British edition of The Guardian found out , “foster” families receive apartments and money for children abducted in Ukraine.

Ukraine says 16,000 children were deported from Russian-held territory during the war, many of whom were sent by friends and relatives seeking to cash in on foster care.

As a vivid example of the mercantile deportation of children in Russia, the publication cites the story of 15-year-old Alina from Kherson. The girl was on good terms with the mother of her friend, who has pro-Russian views, Evgenia. Shortly before the liberation of Kherson, a woman intimidated Alina with fictitious disasters after the return of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and convinced the child to leave with her for Russia.

Not listening to her own mother, but believing an adult friend, the girl stole her documents from home and went to Russia. There, Evgenia assumed the role of Alina’s adoptive mother, for which she received an apartment and financial payments from the state. 

“Yevgenia was so friendly when I was in Ukraine, but she deceived me. When she found out that I was talking to my mother [on the phone], she got angry and hit me. She was obsessed with money and what she could get from authorities for taking care of me,” the girl told reporters.

To bring her daughter home, Alina’s mother was forced to go to Russia, having made a long journey through Poland and Belarus. Oddly enough, local officials in Russia sided with the real mother, which made it possible to resolve this story safely. However, things could have gone much worse.

“If I arrived four days later, my daughter would have already issued Russian documents and that’s it, there would be no way back for her,” Alina’s mother said.

The Russian opposition project We Can Explain notes that Alina’s case is not yet the most egregious. Thus, a Mariupol schoolboy was adopted by a family of alcoholics who drank away the money received to support him. The boy was starving, and the occupying authorities ignored the problem. The child was saved, but many of his classmates still remain in such families. 

“It is even more difficult to rescue children from camps and boarding schools, where they have been brainwashed for months. After such treatment, they themselves refuse to return, in their eyes – the horror of what Ukraine is supposedly doing with the “traitors,” the newspaper writes. 

The problem of deported Ukrainian children

Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets claims that by now the Ukrainian authorities are aware of the forced deportation to Russia of at least 19,453 Ukrainian children. But the actual number is likely to be much higher. Before the war, about 700,000 children lived in the territories that are now occupied. The fate of most of them is still unknown.

In March of this year, the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, issued an international arrest warrant for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Russian children’s ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova. Both are accused of organizing a mass kidnapping of children in Ukraine.

(C)UNIAN 2023