Mykola Kuleba, a quiet man who never raises his voice in public, could not hide his outrage as he was about to travel to a United Nations body in New York for the second time in a month. "What can I tell the world?...I'll say: 'Shame on you!' Then I will ask why neither the UN nor anybody is doing anything. Why are they abandoning Ukrainian children ?"
Kulebas' charity, Save Ukraine, repatriated 176 of the 386 Ukrainian children deported to Russia and returned home since the beginning of the war last year, a small number in the face of a deportation plan that legal experts believe amounts to an act of genocide and which has earned Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner for children's rights, to be targeted by an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
Kyiv has identified 19,546 deported children, while Moscow claims to have "welcomed" 744,000 accompanied or unaccompanied minors to Russian territory. The actual number – the crime is described as "deportation" and "forcible transfer of population" by the Geneva Conventions – lies somewhere in between. "If one counts all those living in the Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014 and in Russia, around 1.5 million children (...) are the victims of a state policy of Russification. They are having their identities changed, their passports changed, and are being taught to hate Ukraine," said Kuleba, a former children rights' ombudsman with the Ukrainian presidency.
Kuleba was expected to make an address at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, September 19. He had already appeared before the UN Security Council on August 24, Ukraine's Independence Day. Begging the world's wealthiest countries to grant "aid and assistance" to the "children stolen" by Russia, he pointed to a rarely mentioned aspect: The fact that children living in territories occupied for almost ten years had become "weapons of war" against Ukraine.
"Moscow has turned the eldest into Russian soldiers through mobilization in occupied territories. Not only is this a genocidal policy of Russification, but in concrete terms, it means that thousands of them are dying fighting against Ukraine, their homeland," an emotional Kuleba said. The international community's apathy leaves him devastated. "When the UN says it's difficult to prove deportation, this is what Moscow wants."
"Even when Ukrainian parents have signed documents authorizing their children to go to such and such school or summer camp, this is deportation. There's a lot of pressure on families because they're living in occupied territory," said Aksana Filipishyna, deputy head of the analytical department of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights.
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