The United States announced the creation of a $25 million fund on Thursday to help with the return of Ukrainian children forcibly relocated to Russia.
The fund will be used for "the identification, return, and rehabilitation of Ukrainian children and youth who have been forcibly transferred or otherwise held away from their families and communities," the US State Department said in a statement.
According to Kyiv, nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken to Russia since Moscow's February 2022 invasion.
The fund will support two kinds of programs: identifying and tracking displaced children, and supporting their reintegration into society, the statement said.
Ukraine's First Lady Olena Zelenska welcomed the creation of the fund, saying on X that "all Ukrainian children must return."
She met in Washington with two senior State Department officials, Riley Barnes and Jeremy Lewin, who are respectively in charge of human rights and humanitarian aid.
The issue is highly sensitive in Ukraine and remains central to every new round of negotiations for a potential peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow.
A UN international commission of inquiry recently accused Moscow of committing "crimes against humanity" by forcibly deporting thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia and obstructing their return.
Russia maintains that it transferred Ukrainian children from captured areas for their own safety and is prepared to return them to their families under conditions it deems appropriate.
Small groups of children have been repatriated through various intermediaries, including US First Lady Melania Trump.
Last year, the Trump administration cut funding to a humanitarian research lab at Yale University that had been collecting data to track the displaced children.
