Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow has been accused of forcibly transferring around 20,000 children from parts of Ukraine seized by its army. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, last week, that 2,000 Ukrainian children had been brought back since the start of the war, but that thousands more remained “captive”.
In October 2022, as Ukrainian troops were approaching Kherson, in southern Ukraine, a convoy of ambulances left the local children’s orphanage. Eleven children were inside, ‘evacuated’ by the Russian occupying authorities. Officially, it was ‘for their safety’. In reality, they were taken away.
The Russians followed a well-established pattern: official orders, medical personnel, transport – everything looked ‘organised’. But once they crossed the administrative border of Kherson region, the children were handed over to Russian authorities. According to information from the Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration as of last year, three of the children were placed in Moscow institutions, seven were eventually returned to Ukraine. One child is reported to have died.
Inesa Chamlay, the then deputy director in the health care administration, is currently in custody for assisting the aggressor, in particular in the transfer of these children. Her case has been under consideration by the Kherson City Court since March 2024. According to the investigation, she provided medical transport for the children’s relocation. If found guilty, she faces up to 12 years in prison.
In January 2025, Mykola Dzhyhanskyi, a businessman who runs a transport company in Kherson, received an 11-year prison sentence. The Kherson court found him guilty of assisting the Russians. One of the witnesses in the case confirmed that the businessman’s buses were used to transport children to the occupied Crimea. The accused claimed he was threatened with losing his business. He is currently appealing the decision. His lawyer points out that the 71-year-old man has age-related illnesses, is a Chernobyl accident rescuer, and the breadwinner for his family. He has been held in a detention centre for more than three years.
The children’s deportation process
The children’s deportation follows several recurring scenarios which include coercion, pressure, military control, and absence of choice for families. In the Kherson region, everything began when the occupiers blocked humanitarian aid from Ukrainian-controlled territory, says Myroslava Kharchenko, head of the legal department of The Save Ukraine Foundation, a non-governmental organisation involved in rescue missions to return displaced children. In such circumstances, the offer to ‘send children to camps’ seemed like a solution, although it was part of a large-scale deportation plan. “Announcements about trips were made at parent-teacher conferences or by phone calls to families. Those who did not agree were considered disloyal to the occupying authorities, which could endanger the whole family,” Kharchenko says.
First, the children whose parents agreed to cooperate with the Russians as collaborators, were sent to Crimea. Then, they returned home. “After that, the children would start asking their parents for permission to go on the trip because they saw that someone had already been to Crimea,” she recalls. Parental consent had to be in writing, but “they could tell the child: ‘bring a copy of your passport and sign instead of your mother’,” Kharchenko says.
“They are now waving these ‘consents’ around like a red rag, saying that the parents gave their permission. But these documents are legally worthless,” she adds, explaining that “for example, consent was given for a two-week stay at the Luchisty camp, but the children remained in Crimea for six months and were moved from camp to camp”.
Lawyer Yevheniya Kapalkina recounts another type of illegal displacement of children – through filtration. As her client, a father of three children was trying to leave Mariupol, he was arrested at a checkpoint, detained and sent to prison in Olenivka, a southern suburb of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine. His children were first taken to a local medical facility.
“On the day the man was released, the occupation administration decided to send the children to the Moscow region, allegedly for health reasons,” the lawyer says. “The children were told that if their relatives could not be ‘found’, they would be sent to an orphanage or Russian families. But their father gathered all the documents and went to Russia. He managed to get the children back.”
Nearly 20,000 documented cases
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, as of 11 November 2025, there were 19,546 documented cases of illegal displacement or deportation of Ukrainian children. So far, the Save Ukraine Foundation has only managed to return 1,024 children, including about 200 orphans. “We brought children back from Crimea, Krasnodar and Rostov regions,” Kharchenko says. “About 80 of them are now adults, but they were minors during the occupation, so they are also considered victims of war crimes.”
One of the most difficult cases was the rescue of a boy from the Oleshky boarding school, in the suburbs of Kherson, in southern Ukraine. His grandmother had all the necessary documents, but the occupying authorities required a DNA test and then declared that they could not ‘give a Russian child to a foreigner’. The child was forcibly granted Russian citizenship.
“They told the grandmother she could get custody, but only if she got a Russian passport and a job in Russia. It was a trap to keep the child from leaving. But we fought for her, and we won,” Kharchenko says.
A Ukrainian demographic disaster
The international humanitarian law prohibits the displacement of people from occupied territories, especially children. Children are entitled to an even higher level of protection, as their deportation means separation from their families, loss of cultural identity, and psychological consequences.
In Ukraine, it is mostly considered as a war crime – a violation of the laws and customs of war. Following recent amendments to the Criminal Code, provisions on ‘unjustified delay in the repatriation of a child’ and ‘recruitment or use of a child to participate in armed conflict’ have been added. However, in a broader context, such actions could be considered a crime against humanity when deportation becomes part of a large-scale policy.
“If children are systematically deported and a political basis is created to support this – decrees, programmes, official statements – then this is no longer just a war crime. It is a crime against humanity and possibly an element of genocidal policy,” says Andriy Yakovlev, a lawyer and expert on international humanitarian law at the Media Initiative for Human Rights.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Centre for Human Rights and co-author of four submissions to the International Criminal Court (ICC) regarding crimes against Ukrainian children committed by Russians, also says that Russia’s actions constitute crimes against humanity and, in terms of scale and consequences, even genocide. “We have already lost our children, but we may lose their children too. This is a quiet demographic disaster,” she notes.
Rashevska points out that “Russia does not recognise international humanitarian law in the occupied territories because it considers them part of its own territory”. “But when it comes to the deportation of children, it suddenly starts quoting the Geneva Conventions and referring to the rules for the evacuation of civilians. It looks like a legal bipolar disorder,” she says.
According to her, the Kremlin is trying to legitimise the displacement of Ukrainian children by twisting the meaning of humanitarian law. They present forced displacement as ‘evacuation for safety’ and distort the concept of ‘the best interests of the child’. In their rhetoric, Russian officials such as Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights, even refer to the children’s own ‘wish’ to stay.
Deportation cases: hard to investigate and hard to judge
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, as a result of documenting and investigating cases of illegal displacement and deportation of children from the occupied territories of Kherson and Donetsk regions, 17 people had been notified of suspicion at the end of the year 2025. And indictments have already been sent to court against ten people: four Russian citizens and six Ukrainian citizens.
But investigating and judging such cases is not easy. “Most children, their parents and witnesses are still in the temporarily occupied territories, which makes it impossible for them to participate in the investigation,” says the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Rashevska points out that the sentences are not proportionate to the scale of the crime. “The paradox is that under our legislation, the maximum penalty for a war crime is 10 years, and it is 15 years for collaboration. This means that a Russian war criminal can receive a less severe punishment than a Ukrainian accomplice. This needs to be changed,” she says.
Most cases judged in absentia
The case of Denys Pushylin, leader of the ‘DNR’ – the self-proclaimed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic –, is currently being heard by the Dnipro Central District Court in absentia.
Pushylin, his advisor on children’s rights, and the director of the pseudo-republic’s ‘state service for family and children’s rights, are accused of war crimes. According to the investigation, in May 2022, the accused signed a ‘decree’ to send the children for alleged health reasons to the Polyany health resort in the Moscow region, run by the Russian president’s administration. The case is considered in absentia, as the accused are located outside Ukrainian-controlled territory.
And it is likely that most of the trials involving Russians will also be conducted in absentia. “We don’t know when the war will end. In a few years, witnesses may die or leave, and cities may be destroyed. Then the evidence will simply disappear. The European Court refers to this as ‘spoliation of evidence’. That is why it is important to document crimes now through legal proceedings, even in absentia,” Yakovlev explains.
Such verdicts are also important for victims: not only they legally establish the crime but they can also serve as grounds for filing a claim for compensation through the International Register of Damage Caused by Russia’s Aggression against Ukraine.
International efforts continue in parallel. Ukraine is cooperating with the ICC and is submitting specific cases to the UN Human Rights Committee, such as a family from Mariupol, which was forcibly taken by the Russians to Taganrog, a Russian port in the Rostov region, despite the agreed humanitarian corridor.
Although cases involving local suspects are referred to Ukrainian courts, lawyers say that cases involving high-ranking Russian officials may become part of the ICC’s investigations.
This report was produced thanks to a grant by Fondation Hirondelle/Justice Info. A full version of this article was published on November 15, 2025, in "Gre4ka".
