Is Russia abducting Ukrainian children or rescuing them from the horrors of war?
An investigation into the questionable evidence behind the allegations that led to the arrest warrant of President Putin, providing an overview of what is actually happening
A few months ago, the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued an arrest warrant for President Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. The reason, in the Court’s own words, is “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” When I reported on last week’s Council of Europe summit, I noticed that many leaders, including EU Commissioner von der Leyen, talked at length about holding Russia to account for its ‘government-orchestrated campaign of abduction, re-education, and forced adoption of Ukrainian children’. I decided to look further into these serious allegations. Contrary to what you might expect, considering how severe issuing an international arrest warrant for a sitting head of state is, I did not find any conclusive evidence that confirmed these allegations.
What makes this entire situation particularly strange (or suspicious depending on your point of view), is that there is plenty of evidence of other war crimes committed by Russians. Although it is possible that the court will add additional charges in future, that is clearly not why the ICC has decided to issue this arrest warrant. As far as I could see, the court is not sharing what evidence it is basing these charges on, besides “incidents identified” by the Office of the Prosecutor and “the accounts of those who had cared for these children, and their fears as to what had become of them.”
Furthermore, there is the elephant in the room that is so big that you cannot even get out of your house; the ICC deciding to prosecute the sitting president of a country that is de-facto at war with the very Western countries that it does not prosecute for their own war crimes. It is especially bizarre to see people like former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown call for the Russian president to be tried for war crimes with a Nuremberg-type tribunal, without any sense of irony or self-reflection with regard to their own complicity in war crimes. This blatant hypocrisy is also part of the reason why politicians in African countries like South-Africa think that “the West is using the ICC – to try and target our leaders; as a means of curtailing the work of that leader” and that it is “doing the bidding for certain powerful nations and that it’s not a fair and objective institution.” Since Russia does not recognise the legitimacy of the ICC (nor does the U.S. for that matter, except when it suits them), I do not see what purpose this arrest warrant serves besides restricting Putin’s movements and pouring further fuel on a conflict that could very well result in the end of most life on Earth.
When someone expresses a semblance of sanity about the unimaginable risks that this conflict poses and the urgent need for peace, or an opinion that is not along the lines of ‘Russia bad, must lose’, ‘Ukraine good, must win’, the media outrage is immense. Just look at this fragment from this recent interview that CNN did with U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, which it has since had to justify (trying oh so hard to not name “that person”/“him”).
The full discussion cannot be found anywhere on YouTube except in short clips, deprived of context and supplemented by the endless blabber of commentators. It can, however, be found on video platform Rumble, often referred to as the ‘free-speech friendly alternative to YouTube’. As this newsletter is purposely not part of the mainstream media, I won’t discourage or prevent you from watching the entire discussion yourself, or from making up your own mind, because I only care about what is true.
That is also why I think it is important to look into today’s topic, so let us get started. In this article, I examine a Yale report that purports to prove the claims of child abduction, and which is often mentioned alongside the arrest warrant as further evidence (besides the warrant itself) of Russian crimes. Additionally, I separate the claims of abduction and re-education camps from those of the adoption of Ukrainian children by Russians. As you will see, evidence for the latter is much stronger, and these adoptions seem to be occurring in a different context than is often presented in the media.
Part 1: Child abductions and re-education camps
Let’s first examine what evidence there is of Russia abducting children. Take a look at the following CNN interview with Nathaniel Raymond, who is the executive director behind a report that allegedly proves that Russia is abducting children and putting them into re-education camps:
Yet, after reading the report mentioned in the clip above, I struggled to find anything that could substantiate these claims of “thousands of children that are in a hostage situation”. You can read the entire report yourself here, but here are some key issues:
Right off the bat, the report comes from the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which is a project of the U.S. State Department (and the report itself also mentions this). It should go without saying that the truthfulness of any report that involves the U.S. government, whose self-proclaimed goal in this conflict is to “weaken Russia”, is inherently suspect.
The ways that the report gathered its evidence. In its methodology, the authors state that “facilities that allegedly host children from Ukraine were identified through social media posts, government announcements and publications, and news reports.” Then, “satellite imagery was used to verify and corroborate” their claims. What it did not do, by its own admission, was “conduct interviews with witnesses or victims” or “identify whether a child had returned home”, nor did anyone involved with the report “request access to the camps”.
Many of the sources, especially those accompanying the most serious claims, are withheld because of “protection concerns” which makes them unverifiable (but not necessarily untrue). Some examples:
“Since February 2022, Russia and its proxies expanded the promotion of ‘camp holidays’ in Russia and Russia-occupied Crimea to newly occupied territories. Statements made by high-level regional officials make clear that these camp programs are designed to “integrate” children from newly occupied territories into Russian life and to enforce a version of Russia’s history, culture, and society that serves the political interests of Russia’s government. 12 In some cases, children also undergo military training. 13”
“After Ukraine’s forces liberated their region, one group of parents contacted the camp officials only to be told that the camp would not be returning their children. 59 After calling the camp director, one mother was allegedly told that children could not be returned because, “There is war there.” 60 There is little information on the explanation given to children regarding the delay. An official at the Medvezhonok camp told a boy from Ukraine that his return was conditional: the children would only be returned if Russia re-captured the town of Izyum. 61 Another boy was told he wouldn’t be returning home due to his “pro-Ukrainian views.” 62” (62 is the only claim with a verifiable source, which points to a Guardian article which mentions a “a series of chilling voice messages from his camp leader telling him he would not be allowed back to Kherson because of his pro-Ukraine views.”)
“More recently, Commissioner Lvova-Belova transported a group of 53 alleged orphans aged nine months to five years from Ukraine by Russian Aerospace Forces plane and facilitated their placement 17 into foster families in Russia. 120 Maria Lvova-Belova has claimed that “Russians have already adopted 350 orphans from the [Russia-occupied] Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and more than a thousand children are waiting for adoption.” 121”
According to the report “many children taken to camps are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled.” (emphasis mine). They did identify “two camps where children’s scheduled return date has been delayed by weeks,” as well as “two other camps” where “children’s returns have been indefinitely postponed,” but at face value, I do not find the reason for these postponements all that unreasonable, namely “safety concerns and ongoing hostilities in Ukraine” (more on that a little bit later). Amazingly, this seems to form the entire basis for the report’s claims that these camps “can constitute a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” The findings of the report itself are also clearly at odds with the claims made in the CNN interview, namely that “thousands of children” are “in a hostage situation”. How can they even claim this with such certainty if they have not visited any of these places, nor interviewed anyone who went there?
And it gets even worse: One journalist, Jeremy Loffredo, who also analysed the Yale report, did visit one of these ‘re-education camps’:
According to him, and the footage and interviews with participants and teachers seems to corroborate this, these camps are more akin to ‘summer camps’, where children take music and language lessons. According to Loffredo, Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director behind the report who you saw in the CNN interview, even acknowledged to him that most of the camps were like that. But hey, let’s not just take his word for it. Let’s see what, once again, the report itself states, namely that parents are sending their children to these camps because they are “low-income and wanted to take advantage of a free trip for their child. 42 Some hoped to protect their children from ongoing fighting, to send them somewhere with intact sanitation, or to ensure they had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live. 43 Other parents simply wanted their child to be able to have a vacation.”
In the cases that this did not happen, the parents were still allowed to come pick them up (although this is of course incredibly difficult, not to mention expensive). Besides, as the journalist explains in the video, parents are likely to keep the fact that they sent their children to these camps a secret, because they could be seen as collaborators with Russia, which could put their lives at risk.
Not that the Russian state is organising these ‘vacations’ out of sheer good will. There are some reports of the children participating in not only “games and sports”, but also in “lectures “about the war””, which undoubtedly paint Russia in a favourable light, and possibly military training, seeing as that is also what Russian children learn at school. Some Ukrainians, like the CEO of a Ukrainian NGO dedicated to evacuating children from battle zones, claim that during their stay, children are told “bad things about Ukraine” and that “nobody from Ukraine needs you — your parents or your country. Forget about it. We can give you Russian citizenship and you will be happy here.” For the most part, though, these camps appear to be providing a safe place away from the horrors of war, where according to parents and children who attended the camps “the conditions were good”, they were taken “to see dolphins, to museums and to the beach,” and where “the teachers were kind, and they often brought sweets to their classes. The children were well-dressed, clean and carrying new toys, including a large, stuffed pink unicorn. The school in Russia taught them local history and language, [...] but nothing about the war in Ukraine.” Of course, it certainly does not hurt Russia’s war effort to be providing its enemy’s children with happy, pleasant memories of the country.
None of this is to say that forceful deportations or adoptions of children are not happening (in fact, in the next section you will see that these claims are far from baseless), only that the evidence of “Russia’s systematic program for the re-education & adoption of Ukraine’s children” provided in the widely shared Yale report is flimsy at best, and that by its own admission, “many children” are “returned to their parents as originally scheduled”. Other sources seem to confirm that these camps are a far cry from mass indoctrination and hostage camps. How legitimate Russian justifications are for not sending back some of these children is of course difficult to verify. On the one hand, there is something to be said for not sending children to active war zones, on the other, these children should be able to return home if they or their caregivers demand it and the Russian government could probably help facilitate their safe return if it really wanted to.
Part 2: Adoption of Ukrainian children and abuse at the border
Now, onto the second part of this story. There are plenty of reports of Ukrainian ‘orphans’, a term which the Russian state seems to conflate with ‘unaccompanied children’, being adopted by Russians. This is why I think it is important to separate the re-education camps claims from the evacuation/deportation ones.
About a year ago, President Putin signed a law that made it easier for children to be adopted by Russian families. An Associated Press report paints a complicated picture of Russian families adopting Ukrainian children so that they can start a new life and be given “affection, love, care, family, mom and dad”, which I do not doubt many of these children do indeed need. Yet at the same time, extensive legal battles are fought by some Ukrainian parents over the custody of their children. It is not hard to imagine that many children, especially orphans, after having endured the horrors of war, might prefer staying in Russia over going back. However, whether or not these adoptions are well-intentioned, and whether or not the children and/or parents actually want to stay, the adoption of children without parents (or with parents, as it sometimes turns out) by the country who started the war that led them to flee their country is obviously unethical. As Human Rights Watch states, “Transferring or displacing civilians is not justified or lawful on humanitarian grounds if the humanitarian crisis triggering the displacement is the result of unlawful activity by the occupying power.” (emphasis mine)
So how do these children end up in Russia? Well, as we established based on the available evidence, it is unclear whether some of these children come from these so-called re-education camps. What is clear, though, is that since the start of the war at least two million Ukrainians have ended up inside Russia. There are also credible reports of abuse, from detention and torture to soldiers looking through cell phones and collecting fingerprints, as the evacuees go through a ‘filtration’ process at border checkpoints, during which people are sorted based on the threat that authorities think they might pose. This undoubtedly also includes children, some of them accompanied by family, others alone. Some of these children seem to have been forcibly separated from their parents during this process. Whether these children have been later reunited with their parents or put up for adoption is not clear. Many international child protection organisations are calling for a halt to Russian adoptions, saying that “each separated child should be considered as still having living relatives or legal guardians and, therefore, is not in need of adoption.”
At this point in the article, since that was a lot to take in (just imagine having to research all that), I think it is a good idea to summarise the facts surrounding this whole situation:
The Ukrainian government has collected reports of “over 14,700 children” that have been “deported” to Russia. It is not clear “whether these children were unaccompanied or under what circumstances they went to Russia.” The government also claims that the actual number is “several hundred thousand”.
The Russian government claims that these children have been “evacuated” away from the frontlines for their own safety, out of areas that it now considers to be part of its territory. They are charging ICC lead prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan with “preparing an attack […] with the intention of complicating international relations.”
Because of the war, nearly 2 million Ukrainian citizens have been forced to flee the country, with a portion of them going to Russia. There are credible reports of abuse that occurs during these evacuations, for instance at border crossings. Some Ukrainians are reporting that the Russian soldiers left them no choice but to go to Russia. Again, the Russian and Ukrainian governments have conflicting views. Ukraine portrays these journeys as forced transfers to enemy soil, and calls them a war crime. Russia calls them humanitarian evacuations of war victims who already speak Russian and are grateful for a new home.
According to an AP report, many Ukrainians stay in Russia because “they have nowhere to go, no money, no documents or no way to cross the distances in a sprawling country twice the size of the United States. Some fear that if they return, Ukraine will prosecute them for going to the enemy — a fear encouraged by Russian officials. Others speak Russian, with family there and ties that they feel are stronger even than their links to Ukraine. One woman told the AP that her husband was Russian and she felt more welcome in Russia.” The teacher that Loffredo interviewed inside the camp said similar things.
There is an unknown number of Ukrainian children inside Russia. Some children have gone there voluntarily, with their parents’ permission, to attend holiday/educational camps. These camps appear to be largely benign, and children are generally safe and well looked after, although it is possible if not likely that during their stay these children will get a favourable impression of the Russian Federation (in fact, that is probably part of the reason that Russia organises these camps).
Other children had no choice but to go to Russia, because they (as well as many adults) had to either flee the fighting or were transported there by Russian soldiers who had occupied the area. If unaccompanied, it is difficult, if not impossible, for parents or family to retrieve these children without active help from the Russian state.
Final thoughts
As I said earlier, I think it is important to separate the allegations of abductions from those of deportation and adoption, not least of all since the former seems to form the basis for the ICC arrest warrant and tells us something about the motives behind it. In other words, the arrest warrant has not been issued because of the credible reports of forced deportation (or forced evacuation) abuse, and torture of Ukrainian civilians, nor because of amply documented Russian war crimes, like using banned cluster munitions on civilian areas and scatterable mines (PTM-1S), nor because of the inherent criminality of starting a war. Instead, the ICC cites the “war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” Why? Well, it could have something to do with the fact that Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor general, decided to exclude U.S. forces from the court’s war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, as well as turn a blind eye to Israeli crimes in Palestine, but is very passionately investigating the Ukraine war, which has brought the court an influx of financial support. It could also have something to do with the fact that the U.S. is deliberately withholding evidence of other Russian war crimes, because it does not want the ‘kangaroo’ International Criminal Court to look into its own war crimes (in which case it will invade the Netherlands). But I am just one person with access to the internet and a functioning brain, so what do I know?
All in all, is what has been happening a case of government-directed abductions that amount to cultural genocide, or are they wartime evacuations and strategic movements of large numbers of citizens, whether forcefully or voluntary? Based on the evidence I found, I am inclined to believe that what has been happening probably consists of a good measure of both, with a lot of grey areas in between. British lawyer and international criminal rights investigator, Wayne Jordash KC, gave a similar assessment: “At best, it exposes the manifest failures of the Russian government to act in good faith to return the children. And at worst, it demonstrates the clear attempt to conceal the unlawful deportation of the children." He is assisting Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General in uncovering, documenting and analysing evidence of war crimes, and says that “they had seen more than 1,000 witness statements concerning Russian torture and that there was compelling evidence to suggest these brutal actions were state-orchestrated.” If these claims are true, then there are plenty of other war crimes that the ICC could investigate (including on the Ukrainian side, which has been deliberately using schools and hospitals as military bases).
However, while I personally agree in principle with prosecuting leaders for their complicity in war crimes, for practical reasons I do not think that in this case it is particularly wise or productive. First of all, it is dishonest to put out an arrest warrant for Putin based on questionable or at the very least still unsettled evidence, especially when credible evidence of war crimes does exist. Secondly, when you have deliberately chosen not to investigate Western war crimes, it undermines the credibility of the entire investigation as well as of the ICC as a whole. It contributes to the perception that the ICC is being used as a tool to further ‘weaken Russia’. Even the ICC’s own President admits that there are other reasons behind the warrant, saying that “one of the most important effects of the arrest warrants” is that it “is a kind of sanction, because the person cannot leave the country.” Furthermore, calling for Putin to be arrested and tried like the Nazis at Nuremberg clearly does not help put an end to this horrific conflict, and in fact seems designed to do exactly the opposite. As Australian whistleblower David McBride said on Twitter: “If we don’t hold our own leaders to account, we can’t hold other leaders to account. If the law is not applied consistently, it is not the law. It is simply an excuse we use to target our enemies.” Moreover, at the Nuremberg trials themselves, Justice Robert Jackson said that
“We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”
How prophetic those words have become, now that we see Western hypocrisies hamper the credibility of a prosecution.
This topic of child deportations is highly complex, contentious, and controversial. Throughout this article, I have attempted to give a fair assessment of the situation, as well as give my thoughts based on the reports that I have found. Obviously, as often happens with war reporting, some of these findings could later turn out to be false or inaccurate, and there could still be information out there that I did not uncover. Nevertheless, I do think that what I found shows that the picture is a lot more complicated and nuanced than politicians or the media would have you believe, which is why I wanted to share this with you. Because of how important I believe it is that we know the truth behind what is currently happening on the world stage, I have decided not to shorten or otherwise restrict access to this post, since each piece contributes to a proper understanding of the wider picture.
With regard to the Yale report, you could make the argument that I should not be using some of the Yale report’s own unverifiable choices to make other points throughout this article. However, I am mainly quoting their sources to demonstrate an inconsistency between their claims and what they themselves claim to have found. In the instances where I have quoted the Yale report in an effort to establish what actually happened, I have also added evidence from other sources. Moreover, I have not encountered any factual errors in the report (although I cannot independently verify many of their findings), only inconsistencies between its findings and its conclusions.
During my research, I found so much more than I could possibly share in one post. A lot of information is vague or contradictory, and it is sometimes difficult to assess which sources are truly trustworthy. I have tried to verify or corroborate information I found by seeing if I could find it elsewhere, as well as by checking for things like video/photographic evidence, proper sourcing, etc. The goal was to create an overview of what claims can actually be supported by compelling evidence, so that I can contribute to an environment in which we are not simply hurling baseless accusations at each other, but instead can have a reasonable discussion based on the facts as they currently are. That is why I highly encourage you to share your opinions, or other information you may have found yourself, in the comments. Please also consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or leaving a donation, as this contributes to me being able to do more investigative journalism in the future. In any case, thank you for being part of this community and for taking the time out of your day to read this post.
