Ukrainian Children At The Heart Of Putin Arrest Warrant

Kyiv:

In its arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president of the battle crime of illegal deportation of individuals, specifically youngsters, and their illegal switch from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

The ICC issued a separate warrant on the identical cost for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for kids’s rights.

Moscow dismissed Friday’s transfer, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling the allegations “outrageous”. Russia, which has denied focusing on civilians since its invasion in February final yr, has repeatedly denied its forces have dedicated atrocities and has rejected previous allegations of illegally transferring Ukrainians.

Following are some key info and figures supplied by the Ukrainian authorities on the problem:

– Daria Herasymchuk, Advisor-Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights and Rehabilitation, described in an interview with Reuters on March 17 5 essential methods she stated Russia has used to illegally switch Ukrainian youngsters.

They embody:

Offering households dwelling in occupied areas to take youngsters for holidays in Russian youngsters’s camps and never returning them throughout an agreed timeframe;

Aking Ukrainian youngsters away from care establishments in occupied areas;

Separating youngsters from mother and father at filtration checkpoints – the locations the place Ukrainian residents from areas below Russian occupation are checked and processed earlier than being allowed to enter Russia;

Taking away parental rights by legal guidelines enforced on occupied territories;

Taking youngsters away in instances the place they had been staying with different adults after their mother and father had been killed within the battle

– Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin stated on March 17 the prosecutors had been investigating instances of deportation of over 16,000 youngsters from Russian-occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Kherson areas. “But the real figure can be much higher,” Kostin stated on his Facebook web page.

– Ukraine has thus far managed to return 308 youngsters, officers stated.

– Iryna Vereshchuk, minister for the reintegration of briefly occupied territories, issued a public attraction on Saturday to Russian officers asking for lists of all Ukrainian orphans and all Ukrainian youngsters whose mother and father had been stripped of parental rights who’re at present in occupied Ukrainian areas or had been illegally transferred to Russia.

– A report revealed in February by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health as a part of the Conflict Observatory stated Russia has held at the very least 6,000 Ukrainian youngsters – probably many extra – in websites in Russian-held Crimea and Russia whose main goal seems to be political re-education. The report stated Yale University researchers had recognized at the very least 43 camps and different services the place Ukrainian youngsters have been held that had been a part of a “large-scale systematic network” operated by Moscow.

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