In kyiv, the return of children deported by Russia: "I was afraid of being there forever"
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REPORT The illegal deportations of young Ukrainians, which earned Vladimir Putin an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, concern more than 16,000 minors taken to Russian soil or to the occupied territories. The Save Ukraine association tries to locate them one by one.
They had disappeared silently, in the turmoil of war. One autumn Friday, the eve of school holidays, hundreds of children from the Kherson region had not returned home. The school principals had encouraged their parents to accept that they go to a two-week summer camp in Crimea. At the end of the holidays, no one had returned. Girls and boys had been caught up in what appears to be a massive Russian operation to deport and “Russify” the children of Ukraine.
Seventeen of them, taken from their families, were repatriated to kyiv on Wednesday March 22 by the humanitarian organization Save Ukraine. The figure for this rescue is staggering, while Ukraine has already identified 16,226 deported children, and the toll could be much higher. These seventeen are the first to return from Russia or occupied Ukrainian territories since the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued arrest warrants on March 17 for "illegal deportation " of children against the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children's Rights of Russia.
Fifteen of these minors from the Kherson region experienced deportation under a common scenario. These are not extremely violent cases, as they are beginning to be documented by Ukrainian or international investigators, of children abducted after the assassination or arrest of a parent, or during a passage in “filtration camps” on the deportation routes. They were instead victims of an insidious method consisting, through the school system, of inviting them to summer camp and then not returning them to their families.
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