Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Oct. 31st, 2023

[Nathaniel Raymond]

Thank you. That's a critical question.

There are three baskets of consent scenarios.

The first is outright abduction. An example of those children is Anna. She was used as propaganda, along with about 11 or 12 other children, in a Defender of the Fatherland Day rally in Moscow. Those children were taken directly from the battlefield after Anna's mother was killed by an artillery shell. It was what can only be described as a straight-up abduction.

In the second basket, there has been consent or a theatre of consent. We have seen some of the power of attorney forms that parents who have “willingly” signed their children over were forced to sign. In one of the power of attorney consent forms we found, the party issuing that form was left blank, meaning those forms cannot be considered meaningful in any way.

In the third consent basket, as was alluded to before, there is direct pressure or duress put on the parents. In some cases—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Can you wrap it up, please?

We exceeded the time. I gave you several seconds.

[Nathaniel Raymond]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Trudel.

Now I would like to invite Ms. McPherson to take the floor for seven minutes.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank all the witnesses for being here today and sharing this testimony. It is harrowing to hear, but I think it is very important to have this study undertaken.

Mr. Chair, I certainly hope there is an opportunity for us to hear from Save the Children at a later date. I understand the witness was ill today and wasn't able to join us. Knowing that Save the Children has repatriated close to half of the children who have been reportedly repatriated, I think it would be important for us to hear from them.

I have a couple of questions.

First of all, one thing I heard in the testimony that I'd like to dig into a bit is the use of Ukrainian children as potential soldiers against Ukraine. I think the testimony we heard from the International Center for Ukrainian Victory was probably the most clear on that.

Perhaps you could talk to me a bit about what we know of the use of these children as child soldiers, or even the potential of them being used as child soldiers.

[Olga Aivazovska]

Thank you for your question.

If I might, I have a few sentences.

Let's separate the 10 years of ongoing war from the last 20 months. I testified for the committee last year, when Russia organized fake elections in the occupied territories. You may know that I had one very important message: After this process, Russia would mobilize Ukrainian civilians—men—for their army. This process is ongoing, but we are speaking about adult men in occupied territory that is now formally, according to the Russian understanding of their constitution, under their jurisdiction. They are doing what they want with Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories.

However, the war was started in 2014. That's why many of the children who were under the occupation from that stage were re-educated to be so-called Russians. They truly believe they are serving the DNR and LNR as civilians from those territories. Russia used their opportunity to re-educate children to be pro-Russian soldiers. Now they are using them as meat, because Russia doesn't care how many men with Ukrainian passports are killed on the battlefield.

We're speaking about that period from 2014 to 2022. Russia used young people and children for re-education, and now they are serving publicly. We have many interviews from the occupied territories from before that tell us that these territories are almost empty of men. Those men are used for battle without any problems, so they are killing Ukrainian men from both sides through these tools. Now we've had, for 20 months or so, this new stage of the war after the full-scale invasion. We've already had six cases of teenagers who were used for the Russian army. One of them was killed on the battlefield. We have testimony about this young person.

We have to cover all the years—nine years of ongoing war—and understand that this is a mass problem. It was started when these young men were children, when Russia occupied the Donetsk and Luhansk.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Obviously, the use of child soldiers has been clearly identified as part of a genocide. It is a precursor. It is something that happens when a genocide is being perpetrated, which we know is happening.

Mr. Mikheiev, do you have anything to add to that? You brought up the idea of forced military service that could be ongoing because these children are becoming Russian nationals without wanting to be.

Could you talk a bit about that as well for me, please, sir?

[Andrii Mikheiev]

Yes.

Except for the one official, established case of a minor voluntarily joining the Russian forces and being killed in combat—he was 16 years old—there are a lot of established cases of teenagers who are, happily, still alive, but they are trained in military programs.

Using children directly as soldiers is not the only way Russia is using children for war purposes. There are also known cases of Russian authorities using children from the occupied territory for intelligence purposes to gather information. They also make teenagers patrol the territory and bring information on people who have links or connections with the Ukrainian armed forces or the Ukrainian law enforcement authorities.

We also know of cases, officially established, in which Ukrainian children unknowingly provided data by locating objects through a mobile game developed and launched by a pro-Russian IT company that is controlled by the Russian special services. The children didn't know that by playing this game and by getting virtual awards and virtual money for uploading the photos of the objects, they were providing data for future missile attacks.

The range of Russia's methods of using children for military purposes is very broad. It's not only the direct use of them as soldiers.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

That's absolutely disgusting.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chair, I'll pass the floor back to you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. McPherson.

Now we'll go to round two.

I invite Mr. Ehsassi to take the floor for seven minutes.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses for this very helpful testimony on an incredibly harrowing development that we should all be concerned about.

I will start off with Mr. Raymond.

Thank you so much for the work that you're doing. If you don't mind, I first want to ask about the conflict observatory program that you prefaced in your introductory remarks. Could you tell us more about that program? All of us are concerned about the need to leverage technology to do a better job when war crimes or crimes against humanity are being committed.

[Nathaniel Raymond]

Thank you.

The conflict observatory program is a project of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department. It is really the first effort, at scale, to support independent researchers, such as the humanitarian research lab at Yale, in having access to particularly the commercial satellite data needed at scale to monitor events in non-permissive environments, such as Ukraine. We also operate in Sudan and have been focused on attacks on villages in Darfur, and in bomb assessment and human security assessment in Khartoum and Omdurman.

In the case of Ukraine, the children's work is just one part of what we do. Our initial work was supporting the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe on doing bomb damage assessments of hospitals and schools in the first phase of the war. Then we did an assessment, with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, of damage to crop storage infrastructure, using algorithmic machine vision to be able to count damaged silos.

We've additionally done open-source reporting on the filtration camps, on the issue of torture in Kherson and on passportization, which was mentioned earlier.

What's critical in the case of Ukraine is that there is an extremely large amount of open-source data. What broke the case open through the conflict observatory with regard to the kids' issues is the fact that the local officials were taking selfies. It was from this that we were able to identify the latitude and longitude of the locations and begin satellite surveillance. Without this program, we would not have had these assets to do this reporting publicly.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you very much for that.

You referenced the OSCE. As you know, towards the end of last year, the OSCE did a report on this issue of the missing children. Its finding was that the Russian authorities have lost track of a lot of these children. In your opinion, is that deliberate, or is it simply incompetence by the Russian authorities?

[Nathaniel Raymond]

What we are seeing is tactical intent in terms of the concealment of children. That is clear, and I can give multiple examples.

There are other cases in which it is not clear that there was any initial accounting system, depending on which cohort of kids we're talking about. Each cohort has sort of a different level of accounting that is either happening or not happening. The critical point here is that under the Geneva Conventions, Russia should have registered these children immediately, within days, through a system called Restoring Family Links.

The challenge now is that we have to attempt to do that registration act without Russia's co-operation. We are basically reverse-engineering the identities through open-source data, which is extremely impossible. We're making progress, but it's like when you go to a fair and there's a jar of jelly beans. We're having to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, and we don't even know how big the jar is.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

If I could go to your recommendations, one of your recommendations was that Global Affairs Canada have a point person to deal with this issue. Could you explain to us whether there is currently a working group among various countries and whether other countries have endorsed such an approach?

[Nathaniel Raymond]

What I'm about to say does not necessarily represent the views of the United States government. It's my own personal opinion.

I was in Rome at the Holy See at the end of September, and what I saw was an immense need for coordination among allies on this issue. There is not the type of central coordination across nations that we need to have.

I say all the time that it's like a car accident. Trauma surgeons have a golden hour after the car accident. We're still in the golden hour, but the golden hour is slipping away on these kids. They will never be easier to find and never easier to return.

I have done child identification work related to Guatemala that took decades. It took DNA, and many of the parents were dead by the time we found them. I don't want to see that happen here, but right now, in the absence of international coordination that's proactive and extremely expansive in terms of the four missions here: There's a hostage rescue mission, a law enforcement mission, a psychosocial support mission and an ID-missing-persons mission.

Each of those is extremely hard. Our minimum number is 10 times the size of 9/11 in terms of identifying missing persons.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

I certainly hope that various countries will come forward and endorse this approach you have in mind, but have any other countries done so as of yet?

[Nathaniel Raymond]

To my knowledge, there's no central coordination at present.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Could you explain to us the consent process that is involved? I suspect a lot of the consents that the Russians have received were obtained under duress. Could you speak to that specific issue as well?

[Nathaniel Raymond]

The consent issue is for the camps. It would happen under duress and often happened with these power of attorney forms that were not appropriately executed.

In the case of the battlefield kids and the filtration kids, there was no consent whatsoever.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Ehsassi.

Now I would like to invite Mr. Genuis to take the floor for seven minutes, please.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

For our witnesses with the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, could you describe further the mechanism of coercion of parents? In some cases I read about, they were told that it was a week-long camp, and then the kids were not returned. In other cases, they were coerced in various other ways.

What are the mechanisms whereby parents are coerced?

[Andrii Mikheiev]

I'm sorry. You mean they were coerced by the Russian occupants, right?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Exactly. They were coerced into allowing their children to go maybe for something they thought was temporary, and then they were unable to see their children after that.

[Andrii Mikheiev]

When the children, together with their parents, were first deported to the territory of the Russian Federation, they were coerced by the argumentation that there was no other way. It's very important to understand that despite the fact that international organizations, including UN authorities, offered alternative corridors for Ukrainian children and their parents to pass, Russian-occupying authorities refused to let them go through these corridors and insisted that the only way for them to emigrate from the zone of military action was through the Russian territories, that it was the only way of saving them and their children from the war and from death. Of course, it was very hard for these parents not to agree with these arguments to save their children's lives.

After they were deported to the Russian territories, all of them passed through the obligatory procedural filtration, and often filtration did not go well for the parents and parents were arrested. In these cases, the children were deported from their parents. Also, there were cases of children being forced to remain in the Russian territories while their parents were allowed to leave, and there were no possibilities for those parents to immediately reunite with their children.

As for the evacuation and the conditions that took place during the evacuation, we must note that according to its obligations under the Geneva Convention and under the additional protocol 1, the occupying state should not evacuate the civilian population unless there is no other way. In these cases, a lot of alternative ways to evacuate children with parents and orphans and children deprived of parental care to the territory controlled by Ukraine existed; therefore, Russia directly violated its obligations—