Illustration photo – Children go to school in the Ukrainian city of Irpin, September 1, 2022.
Kyiv – Tens of thousands of children may have disappeared in Ukraine and may have been deported to Russia. Ukrainian MP Ivanna Klympušová-Cincadzeová stated this in an interview with Sky News TV station today. Ukrainians have been accusing the Russian authorities of forcibly deporting children for a long time, Moscow denies this.
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“We have about 13,000 confirmed cases of Ukrainian children being deported to different parts of the Russian Federation,” Klympušová-Cincadzeová said. “However, we also have information about many others, it could be tens of thousands. But we have no official record of them,” she added, adding that it is part of the “genocide that the Russian Federation is committing against the Ukrainian people”.
According to Klympušová-Cincadzeová, about a hundred of these children managed to return to their families with the help of human rights organizations. “Some of the children went through filtering camps with their parents, where they were separated from their parents. Some were taken for a week to so-called summer camps, but they never returned home,” the MP described the ways in which children disappear. “Some of them have already been given for adoption to Russian families, as if they had no families of their own in Ukraine,” she added.
Ukraine has long accused the Russian authorities of forced deportations of children from Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Moscow says allegations of child abductions from Ukraine are not true. However, hundreds of orphans were actually taken to the territory of Russia, the BBC wrote earlier on its Russian-language website, according to which many of these children received Russian citizenship and were placed with Russian families.
