A photo on a Russian official’s Telegram channel. A video from a propaganda resource. A post on the Russian social network Vkontakte. A source review report. Geolocation. Metadata. Linguistic analysis. And finally – a notice of suspicion... Between the child’s first trace on the Internet and the court’s verdict there is an abyss. A temporal, legal, procedural, and technical one.
On 21 March 2022, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine opened criminal proceedings into the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children to occupied territories and their subsequent deportation to the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus.
As of September 2025, information on 19,546 Ukrainian children alleged to be illegally deported is being verified as part of these proceedings. But so far, only 16 suspects, including four Russian citizens, have been notified of suspicion. Three trials against 10 individuals have begun. No verdicts have yet been issued.
19,546 children. 16 notices of suspicion. 10 defendants. 0 verdict. Why?
Two Russian Duma members among the suspects
In 2022, Yana Lantratova, a Russian State Duma deputy and an advisor to the leader of the party “A Just Russia” travelled to occupied Kherson. She was accompanied by Inna Varlamova, the wife of Sergei Mironov, leader of the party “A Just Russia”. The two women took an 11-month-old girl and an almost two-year-old boy from the regional children’s home to Moscow, allegedly for medical treatment, although, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, the children did not require treatment.
The BBC reported that the children, who are half-siblings, were later issued Russian birth certificates. In its investigation, the BBC claims that Varlamova and her husband adopted the Ukrainian girl and changed her identity: Margarita is now called Marina. The children have not yet been returned. Both Lantratova and Varlamova are accused of organising the forcible transfer and deportation of children to Russia.
Igor Kastiukevich, also a member of the Russian State Duma, in charge of social security in the Kherson region during the city’s occupation, is also a suspect in this case, as well as in the transfer of 46 children from the same regional children’s home to Crimea. According to the investigation, Kastiukevich posted a video on his Telegram channel showing the children being taken. Later, some of the children’s profiles appeared on the Moscow Region government’s adoption website. Kastiukevich allegedly was helped by four Ukrainian citizens, respectively in charge of the children’s home, the regional health department, and the ministry of Health of the occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
DNR officials involved in deportation
Another case deals with the illegal transfer and deportation of 31 children from the occupied Donetsk region to Russia. The youngest was six years old at the time, the oldest was 17. Nineteen were orphans or children deprived of parental care from Mariupol, and nine were from the occupied cities of Shakhtarsk and Khartsyzsk. Three more children lived in Mariupol with their father, who was sent to the Olenivka prison, near Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine
In May 2022, the head of the DNR (the self-proclaimed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic), Deny Pushylin, signed a decree to send children for alleged health treatment to the Polyany sanatorium in the Moscow region. He entrusted the task of implementing this decree to Eleonora Fedorenko, his advisor, and Svetlana Mayboroda, who runs the DNR Family and Children’s Service.
The children were taken to the DNR capital Donetsk, then by bus to Rostov-on-Don, and later by a Russian official plane to Moscow. They were given documents from the DNR, then issued Russian passports and transferred to Russian foster families. Among them is a 17-year-old teenager from Mariupol, who was placed under the guardianship of Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian president’s commissioner for children’s rights.
Among the 31 children, 25 remain in deportation to this day.
A Russian army officer also suspected
Dzhabrail Yusupov, a Russian army officer, commander in a Cossack Motor Rifle Brigade, is also a suspect. On 24 March 2022, Russians occupied the village of Novopetrivka in the Mykolaiv region, where a boarding school with 15 orphaned children was located.
According to the Ukrainian investigation, in mid-July 2022, armed men in uniform entered the school grounds. Under Yusupov’s command, they took away the children, along with the school’s principal and her husband. They were first transported to a rehabilitation centre in the village of Stepanivka in the suburbs of Kherson, then to Dzhankoy in occupied Crimea, and finally to the Zhemchuzhina Rossii recreation camp in Anapa. After a month there, Ukrainian volunteers managed to evacuate the orphans to Georgia, in the South Caucasus.
Of the 16 individuals who have been notified of suspicion in connection with the deportation and forced displacement of Ukrainian children, 10 are defendants in three criminal proceedings currently being heard in the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv, in absentia, without the defendants’ presence. The hearings are closed. No verdicts have been issued yet.
The six other suspects, including Pushylin, are not currently being heard by the courts. Their proceedings are at the stage of pre-trial investigation.
The paradox of numbers
“Theoretically, we could have 20,000 cases and only two suspects,” says Kateryna Rashevska, an expert on international justice and legal analysis at the Regional Centre for Human Rights. When it comes to abducted children, she explains, dozens or even hundreds of children may be part of one single case.
But this is not the main reason for the discrepancy between the number of cases and the number of notices of suspicion. The main problem faced by investigators is that the children, their parents and legal representatives, as well as witnesses remain in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine. “Thus, it is not possible to gather evidence in a proper manner, it is not possible to interview witnesses in a proper manner, and there is no access to suspects or defendants,” says Myroslava Kharchenko, head of the legal department at the NGO Save Ukraine.
Another factor explains the discrepancy: prioritisation. “The deportation and forced displacement of Ukrainian children is, of course, a matter of national interest,” Rashevska says. “Overall, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, around 170,000 war crimes have been committed, and all of them need to be investigated.”
“This means that we will focus primarily on the organisers, on those individuals who determined the fundamental aspects of the implementation of the deportation and forced displacement policy,” she adds. “For example, a member of the State Duma is a person who not only deported children but also participated in their militarisation and re-education.”
Digital evidence: from screenshot to protocol
According to Rashevska, Ukrainian investigators try to investigate children’s deportation cases with a very high threshold of proof. This is done to ensure that the evidence they gather could be considered admissible by international courts in the future.
The Prosecutor General’s Office states that “information contained in open sources on the Internet is recorded and used as evidence of the illegal transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children”. But to become evidence, open-source information must undergo a complex verification process. “This involves assessing its relevance, admissibility, validity and sufficiency,” Rashevska explains.
When it comes to information from the Russian side of Telegram, YouTube, Facebook or Vkontakte, it is not enough to simply download a video or photo to include it in criminal proceedings. An investigative action called a ‘source review’ must be carried out with a relevant protocol prepared, attached to the criminal proceedings, to have evidentiary value.
Then the authenticity of the source must be established. “If information from, for example, Maria Lvova-Belova’s Telegram channel is used, then the first step is to prove that it is indeed her Telegram channel,” Rashevska explains. “And in order to use her words from this channel as evidence, an expert in criminal proceedings needs to perform a linguistic examination and accurately write down exactly what Maria Lvova-Belova said and what she meant by it.”
An additional complication is coming from the Ukrainian legislation. “We have a provision stating that photo and video materials can have evidentiary value and be used as evidence in proceedings, in accordance with the Criminal Procedure Code, but we have not yet determined what constitutes ‘digital electronic evidence’,” Rashevska points out.
This legislative gap creates opportunities for appeal. In modern judicial practice, if digital evidence is gathered correctly, it is accepted. However, the information gathered through open sources intelligence (OSINT) tools might raise more doubts and questions about its admissibility in court, if the tool is not certified by the Ukrainian state. In such cases, Karchenko adds, additional expert examinations could address this issue.
Standards of evidence: from national to international courts
At the international level, the Berkeley Protocol provides unified rules for the gathering, metadata, interpretation traceability, authenticity and storage of information from open sources.
For the Special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, currently being established, “it would be a good thing if its statutes clearly specified the possibility of admitting evidence taken from open sources and the criteria it must meet in order to be considered admissible,” Rashevska says.
In practice, digital evidence in international courts and tribunals is often corroborated by external evidence, such as expert testimony or other types of evidence.
So far, there have been tens of thousands of digital traces gathered by volunteers, journalists and OSINT analysts, thousands of hours of work by investigators and prosecutors, hundreds of reports on the digital sources examination and expert analysis. Every screenshot from a Russian official’s Telegram channel, every video from a propaganda resource, every post on Vkontakte undergoes a complex transformation process, from information to evidence.
The cases of deportation of Ukrainian children are another test ground for the Ukrainian legal system. It is a test of whether it can adapt quickly enough to the conditions and challenges of wartime.
This report was produced thanks to a grant by Fondation Hirondelle/Justice Info. A full version of this article was published on November 11, 2025, in "Status Quo".
