According to a report published on the website of Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Russia “accommodated” over 700,000 children from Ukrainian soil in the year 2022.
The report said that since February 2022, Russia had “accommodated about 4.8 million residents of Ukraine and the Donbas republics, of whom more than 700,000 were children”, most of whom “arrived together with their parents or other relatives”.
The report claims that some 1,500 Ukrainian orphans were taken to Russia from the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. 288 children from the “DPR” and 92 children from the “LPR” were subsequently given over to Russian foster families.
Russian authorities also deported 52 children from the Alyoshkinsky orphanage in the Kherson region to the annexed Crimea.
"The report we prepared spans over 500 pages — it’s the largest in the history of the office of federal children’s commissioner,” Lvova-Belova pointed out.
Ukrainian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, claimed in June that Russia was holding deported Ukrainian children in 57 regions of Russia.
“In 16 regions, at least 380 children have been victims of forced transfer to Russian families. The Russian military has also abducted children in the temporarily occupied territories for purposes of intimidation, putting pressure on relatives, and intelligence gathering,” Lubinets said.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova on suspicion of illegal deportation and transfer of children from the occupied regions of Ukraine to Russia.
Last September, Lvova-Belova said that orphans from Mariupol were being “taught to love Russia” in their new families. She explained that the children “found in the cellars of Mariupol” had very negative attitudes towards Russia: “they spoke harshly about President [Putin], said all sorts of nasty things, sang the Ukrainian anthem, said ‘Glory to Ukraine’, and all that.”
A reporter with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a Russian government newspaper, asked Lvova-Belova a question [an evidently sarcastic one — translator’s note] about whether she was stealing Ukrainian children. She laughed and replied, “Yes, I am”.
