More Russians seek to adopt Ukrainian children: Putin

After a report this week renewed scrutiny on Moscow for deporting Ukrainian children and detaining others, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, ignoring widespread condemnations of human rights abuses, said more Russian families want to adopt Ukrainian children.

In a meeting with Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, on Thursday, Putin said a growing number of Russians are looking to adopt children from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine, according to RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news agency. Putin illegally declared that those provinces were part of Russia after hastily arranged sham referendums last year.

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Lvova-Belova has been the leader behind the mass transfers of Ukrainian children to Russia and Russian-occupied territory and said that she adopted a teenager from Mariupol. She was placed under sanctions by the US State Department in September for her role in deporting “tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.”

In her meeting with Putin on Thursday, Lvova-Belova added that her department searches for the children’s blood relatives before putting them up for adoption, although The New York Times reported in October that this was not always the case.

The report published this week found that the Russian government is holding at least 6,000 Ukrainian children in camps in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea as part of what human rights advocates call Moscow’s systemic attempt to Russify occupied parts of Ukraine. Most of the children, who are between 4 months and 17 years old, are being kept at “integration programs” that are designed to immerse them in pro-Russian ideals. Other facilities are holding children before putting them up for adoption or foster care in Russia.

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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly one year ago, Russian authorities have announced with fanfare the transfer of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia to be adopted and become Russian citizens. On state-run television, officials offer teddy bears to new arrivals, who are portrayed as abandoned children being rescued from war.

A mass transfer of children is a war crime, regardless of whether they were orphans, experts say. And while many of the children did come from orphanages and group homes, authorities also took children whose relatives or guardians want them back, according to international human rights officials.

Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Thursday that Russia must provide a list of the children who have been taken to allow them a chance to be reunited with their families.

“We need to think creatively about ways we can help Ukraine record and track where Russia has taken Ukraine’s children,” Carpenter said in a statement. “History will not be kind to us if we choose to do nothing in the face of such systematic depravity.”

Carpenter said that if the children were relocated “for purposes of changing, altering or eliminating national identity,” he said, that would “constitute a component act of the crime of genocide.”