To answer your second question first, unfortunately, no, there is not currently a registry for these children—not one that is centralized, not one that all humanitarian partners are able to contribute to and draw from in a consistent way and, importantly, not one that international law enforcement is able to contribute to and draw from.
This is essential. We need a resource that our global law enforcement will be able to access, because when children are essentially able to escape this system and move on, they may not be moving on entirely within Russia, but they also may not necessarily go back to Ukraine. If they are ever brought, coercively or not, to another country, where they end up and what happens to them need to be accessible. Their identity needs to be accessible to them. Given the extent of Russia's measures to comprehensively erase their identities and the ability of adoptive families to completely change their names, to change the origin of their birth entirely, it's crucial that this information be established and that this registry be created.
To answer your first question on the level of indoctrination and how insidious that is, I want to acknowledge that this is an area where my colleague Mykola has done such outstanding work, as has the team of psychologists and social workers that he works with.
With regard to the damage that is done, particularly to the children at the younger ages who have been swept into the system—we're talking about 1.6 million Ukrainian children who are under Russian occupation—the impact, the level of the impression that can be made is very strong, particularly when an opportunity is created when the child is traumatized.
That is the first thing that Russia creates here. It creates the opportunity for a trauma bond with the perpetrator of the crime. It then works to expand that by filling the space with the propaganda, with the indoctrination, saying, “Now you have a new home, a new mother, and that mother is Mother Russia.” This is what is so dangerous.
