I want to thank the members of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights for inviting me here today to speak on the urgent issue of Russia’s systematic campaign of transfer, deportation, re-education and adoption of Ukrainian children.
As my colleague mentioned, the UN Security Council has identified six grave breaches against children that occur during war. These are the killing and maiming of children, recruitment or use of children in armed forces and armed groups, attacks on schools or hospitals, raping or other grave sexual violence, abduction of children, and denial of humanitarian access for children. All six of those appear to have been perpetrated by Russia against the children of Ukraine.
Before I proceed, I want us to remember all the other millions of children around the world, from Gaza to Israel to Sudan, who are also suffering these grave breaches now.
I want to briefly summarize today the public findings of the research that our team at the humanitarian research lab at the Yale School of Public Health has undertaken on the issue of Ukraine’s children specifically. This work is undertaken as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Conflict Observatory program, which uses high-resolution satellite imagery and open-source data to document alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The HRL team has been studying the forced deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children since the summer of last year. We published our first report on the subject, “Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-Education and Adoption of Ukraine’s Children”, in February 2023. We expect to have more reports coming out this fall in the coming weeks. We will provide those to the subcommittee and prepare a briefing if requested.
What I want to start with is that we have concluded as of February that at least 6,000 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least 43 facilities inside occupied Crimea and Russia to be subjected to so-called “patriotic re-education”; military training in the cases of at least two facilities, including one in Chechnya; and in some cases, forced fostering and adoption. These facilities stretch over 3,500 miles from the Black Sea to the eastern Pacific coast at Magadan, including one location in Siberia.
Many of the children have returned from the camps, but an unknown number—at least approximately 600 as of February 2023—remain in the facilities. The number of adopted children is unknown, but we at the humanitarian research lab and Conflict Observatory are working to answer that question literally as we speak.
It is important to understand that the children range in age from six months at the time of capture to eighteen years of age.
Here is some quick background on the origins of the program.
The program really began in 2014, with so-called “patriotic re-education” occurring at summer camps in Crimea and also in the occupied areas of Donbas. Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, President Vladimir Putin has significantly ramped up this operation to an almost industrial scale, through multiple means and measures. In early 2022 he removed laws that once prevented the adoption of Ukrainian's children. The facilities available for re-education purposes have been rapidly expanded in number and capacity. We think there are an additional 40 facilities besides those we identified in our report in February.
I want to really make clear in the limited time I have left that there are four groups of kids. There are the kids at the camps. There are the kids who were captured on the battlefield, whom we know the least about. A third group, called “the evacuees”, are children taken from facilities that were Ukrainian state facilities in places like Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv in the early phase of the invasion. They likely make up the majority of the children being adopted. The fourth group, which we call the “filtration kids”, were likely separated from their parents in filtration camps set up in Donetsk after the fall of Mariupol.
To close, there are four concrete steps that the Canadian government can take to help get these kids home.
First, the Prime Minister should designate a high-level focal point on issues related to unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukraine's children within the foreign ministry to coordinate Canada's activities on this matter, particularly with Ukraine, the United States and other allies.
Second, the RCMP, CSIS and other agencies in Canada's law enforcement and national security community have a critical role to play in proactively coordinating with the Ukrainian government on information sharing and the development of common data systems to support individual child identification and return.
Third, CIDA should work with its Ukrainian partners to identify and financially support the massive capacity needs around identification, reintegration and psychosocial support.
Last, fourth, Canada should leverage all of its diplomatic might to persuade other countries, particularly the Global South and all other allies that have not yet condemned these alleged war crimes—which were indicted by the International Criminal Court a month after our report's release—to denounce these activities and call for these kids to come home.
Thank you.
