Ukraine returns two more children from occupation
20 March 2024 12:05
Two more children have been returned to the territory controlled by Ukraine from the temporarily occupied territories. The head of the Kherson regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, announced this in Telegram, Komersant ukrainskyi 
reports
“Another Ukrainian family is finally on free land. We managed to rescue from the occupation a foster family with two children deprived of parental care. These are boys aged 13 and 15. Now they are all safe, under the supervision of doctors and psychologists,”
– the official said.
According to him, since the beginning of 2024, 40 children have been returned to the territory controlled by Ukraine.
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.
Darya Gerasymchuk, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, questions the figure given 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.
