Foreign intelligence service of Ukraine (SZRU) found specific addresses where children kidnapped by Russia are locatedUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi announced on Friday. According to him, Ukraine’s allies will now receive lists of children that Moscow must return. The first one contains more than 300 names, surnames and addresses. TASR informs about it.
Ukraine claims that during the war, more than 19,500 children were taken to Russia or the territory occupied by Russia without the consent of their families or guardians. Kyiv calls these abductions a war crime that allegedly meets the definition of genocide according to the wording of the UN convention. Moscow claims in its defense that it was protecting the children from the fighting by removing them.
In the meantime, 1,625 children from Russia were returned to Ukraine as part of the Bring Kids Back UA humanitarian program initiated by Zelensky in 2023. In a video published on the social network on Friday, X said that this is a sensitive issue on which Ukrainian diplomacy is working intensively and quietly.
“In order to thwart any attempt by Russia to claim that it allegedly knows nothing about these children, we are ensuring that the addresses are also included (on the lists),” the Ukrainian president said. “The first such list – containing more than 300 surnames, first names and addresses of abducted children – will be on the desks of all leaders involved in this effort,” he added. It was for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Ombudsman Maria Lvovova-Belovova.
A group of American politicians around Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal, after the recent incident with Russian drones in Poland, began to think again about the possibility that will present a bill in the US Senate that, if approved, could designate Russia and Belarus as states supporting terrorism in connection with the deportation of children from temporarily occupied territories.
