161 children abducted by Russians found in Germany
17 April 2024 10:50
Ukrainian and German law enforcement officers have found 161 children abducted by Russia from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine in Germany. The head of the National Police of Ukraine, Ivan Vyhivskyi, said this during a meeting in Berlin with the president of the German Federal Criminal Police Office, Holger Münch, Komersant ukrainskyi 
citing Ukrinform.
“Thanks to our cooperation with German law enforcement agencies in documenting the war crimes of the Russian Federation, namely the deportation and forced displacement of Ukrainian children, the location of 161 Ukrainian children in Germany who were wanted as forcibly displaced to the temporarily occupied territories or deported to Russia and Belarus has been established,” Vyhivskyi said,
– Vyhivskyi informed.
Abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia
on 1 February 2024, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin said that during the war, Russia forcibly removed 19,546 children from Ukraine under the guise of “humanitarian operations”.
“These children are not only displaced, but also deprived of their Ukrainian identity: they are granted Russian citizenship, placed in Russian families, forced to undergo re-education in Russian, and forbidden to speak Ukrainian. Teenage boys are often forced to participate in militarisation programmes,”
– Kostin said.
At the same time, this estimate of the scale of abductions of Ukrainian children is not the only one and certainly not the highest. In particular, the main organiser of these abductions, the so-called Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Russian Federation, Maria Lvova-Belova, in the summer of 2023, mentioned the figure of 744,000 Ukrainian children “taken by the Russian Federation”. russia does not provide any data on this process and is not accountable to anyone, so it is almost impossible to verify the veracity of this statement.
Daria Gerasymchuk, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, questions the figure quoted by Belova and believes that it is a standard exaggeration of Russian propaganda. The Ukrainian side estimates that there may be 200-300,000 abducted Ukrainian children. These estimates are approximate, as we are talking about children from the occupied territories and information about them is collected in a variety of ways.
However, the Ukrainian side has absolutely accurate data on abductions, including personal data, only for 19,546 children. That is why this figure is officially announced, although everyone understands that it is quite far from reality.
