The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab released a new report on Russia’s coerced adoption of Ukrainian children. According to it, Moscow launched the programme together with its all-out invasion, pointing to crimes against humanity.
ADVERTISEMENTTaken from homes, detained for months and subjected to intense propaganda before coerced adoption — a new report by Yale’s School of Public Health has shed light on Russia’s forceful deportation of Ukrainian children and revealed information and details unknown until now.
The researchers were able to track down how exactly Moscow is removing children from their homes, forcefully re-educating them and then placing them with Russian families under coerced adoption schemes in a “systematic” way.
The documented operation, research shows, was initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his subordinates with the intent to “Russify” children from Ukraine.
According to Ukrainian authorities, Russia has forcefully deported over 19,500 Ukrainian children. Yale HRL identified 314 Ukrainian children who have been adopted by Russian families and placed into institutions across 21 regions in Russia.
Most critically, children taken from Ukraine are fundamentally presented in Russia’s databases as if they were from Russia.
For this, Russia’s officials amended the federal law to simplify the process of conferring Russian citizenship to children from Ukraine who were allegedly orphaned or left without parental care.
This fast-tracked the issuing of Russian citizenship to children from Ukraine, which, according to law, is required for children to be placed under the guardianship of — or adopted by — families in Russia.
None of the databases analysed by Yale HRL include information suggesting that the child is from Ukraine and or acknowledging their Ukrainian nationality or place of origin.
Approximately half (46.6%) of the children identified have siblings also listed in the databases. In at least one case, three children from a family of four were placed with a citizen of Russia without their fourth, eldest sibling who remained listed for adoption on Russia’s databases.
Moscow’s coerced adoption scheme
In September 2022, seven months into the full-scale invasion, Russia declared its unilateral annexation of four Ukrainian regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, without fully controlling those territories.
By that time, Russian forces had already taken Ukrainian children to what Yale HRL calls “midpoints” and listed them on Russia’s child placement databases.
“The way it works is there’s three interconnected databases, one of which is directly run by the Ministry of Education. After the September annexation of the area occupied by Russia, they move the children from midpoints points, basically safe houses where they had held them for six months and then placed them in the database,” Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab told Euronews.
“At that point, about over 140 entered into the database and were then we know that many of them were placed with Russian families following their placement in the database,” he added.
While in those midpoints, Ukrainian children had to undergo forced re-education, Raymond explained. There are multiple aspects to Russia’s reeducation process, which amounts to indoctrination, he said.
“That includes, for older boys, military training, including vehicle and weapons operations. It also includes other types of military training, including parachute jumping,” Raymond said.
ADVERTISEMENT“And then for younger children, it includes indoctrination in Russian narratives, singing Russian songs and being prohibited from speaking in Ukrainian.”
At least 67 of the 314 children from Ukraine have been “naturalised” as Russian citizens since being taken to Russia, although Yale HRL can reasonably assume that the number of formally naturalised children is significantly higher.
But what happened to those who resisted the indoctrination and yet got into Russian databases and were forcefully moved to Russia?
Raymond said that many of the older children have tried to leave Russia.
ADVERTISEMENT“Once they get citizenship or just before citizenship is forced upon them, often because they don’t want to engage in military service,” he pointed out.
“We also know that for older kids, many of them who went into this program with 17 or now 20 or 21, and so they are the age of majority. And many have tried to get back to Ukraine or elsewhere in Western Europe.”
Partaking in invasion, deportation and forced adoption
In its new report, Yale HRL also tracked down the very first cases of Russia’s coerced adoption strategy to prove it was an essential part of the full-scale invasion and was as important to Moscow as the military aspect.
The Kremlin launched this program in the first weeks of 2022, in tandem with its preparation for its all-out invasion of Ukraine. Russia had already held parts of the Donbas after its limited invasion in 2014, when Moscow also occupied and unilaterally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea.
ADVERTISEMENTMoscow started to systematically transport children, including some of those children identified in the Yale HRL study, from two schools in the occupied Donetsk oblast into Russia as early as 18 February 2022, six days before Russia’s troops first entered Ukraine.
The heads of Russia-controlled so-called DPR and LPR ordered the evacuation within hours before children were moved under the pretence of what they called “an imminent threat of attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces”.
Raymond says this was not a coincidence.
“It was directly connected and calibrated to both the military invasion and, as we saw, with the annexation actions, as it related to the placement of the children in the database,” he explained.
ADVERTISEMENT“Both the military actions and the political actions and the treatment of the children all were synchronised intentionally by design.”
Putin’s plane and presidential money, all to deport Ukrainian children
Another evidence of how important the deportation and coerced adoption of Ukrainian children is for Moscow is the fact that Russian presidential aircraft and funds were used in the endeavour, the report found.
Between May and October 2022, Russia’s Aerospace Forces and aircraft under the direct control of President Vladimir Putin’s office transported multiple groups of children from Ukraine on Russian flag-bearing military transport planes.
“Not only did he (Putin) have a direct command and control role as the head of state, but he also had a very unique, specific logistical relationship by, in the early phase, using the available resources of his office,” Raymond said.
ADVERTISEMENT“Both funds, buildings and planes to facilitate this program and it implicates his office not simply in the command and control program, but in actually logistically running it.”
“And that makes sense given Maria Lvova-Belova‘s role as child rights commissioner sitting in the Kremlin using the resources available to her before the program was formalized with the Duma. And those resources were from the president’s office,“ he added.
Can anyone be held responsible?
According to Kyiv officials, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Moscow has forcefully deported over 19,500 Ukrainian children. However, in reality, the number is likely much greater, given Ukraine’s lack of access to occupied areas of the country.
Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Lvova-Belova revealed in July of last year that around 700,000 Ukrainian minors have been “transferred” to the country since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
ADVERTISEMENTThe situation might get even worse, as around 1.5 million Ukrainian children who still live in occupied areas of Ukraine remain at high risk of being deported to Russia.
In March of last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Lvova-Belova for their actions and involvement in the unlawful deportation of children and the unlawful transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.
The US, EU, and UK have all sanctioned Lvova-Belova for her alleged role in the scheme. Lvova-Belova herself said that she personally “adopted” a teenage boy from Mariupol, a Ukrainian city destroyed and captured by Russia in the spring of 2022.
The new Yale HRL report states the coerced deportation, re-education, adoption and fostering of children from Ukraine documented in this report may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the findings have been transferred to the ICC.
ADVERTISEMENTThe expectation is that the new information might not only strengthen the case against Putin and Lvova-Belova, but also bring further charges against the duo.
“The evidence that we provide in this report we provided through direct transfer to the International Criminal Court is clear evidence of alleged crimes against humanity,” Raymond said.
“And now it is up to the ICC in other jurisdictions to decide whether they want to charge. We’ve given them all the information we have, and we believe the case is clear.”
