Good morning, Chair El-Khoury and distinguished members of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights.
Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear before you today and to unmask the war crimes and other atrocities that Russia is committing against Ukrainian children. We're equally glad for being given an opportunity to submit a brief paper on that matter.
At the outset, I wish to convey my sincere gratefulness to Canada, its government and people, for your unwavering and continuous support of Ukraine. The issue of our bilateral co-operation and partnership was widely discussed at yesterday's event in Toronto entitled “United for Justice Conference: War Crimes against Ukrainian Children”. The event hosted prominent Canadian and international experts, and Ministers Joly and Virani.
Sadly, as we speak, Russia continues to commit heinous acts as a distinct feature of Russian military and political doctrine and a modus operandi of the Russian armed forces and their proxies. The forced deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children is one of the atrocious consequences of Russia's aggression—an ill-fated practice implemented from the early days of the occupation of parts of Ukrainian territories in 2014.
What does Russia do? It forcibly displaces, completely removes and separates children from their parents, immediate family and the settings in which they have initially been reared.
The top political leadership of the Russian Federation is the mastermind of this large-scale policy implemented under the pretext of security and health concerns or for vacation purposes. In Russia, Ukrainian children are stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship and put up for adoption with Russian families via online advertised adoption websites. It's not a mere allegation but an openly publicized practice that is supported and even co-perpetrated by the Russian officials who are supposed to protect children's rights and freedoms.
The first two arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for President Putin and the so-called child commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the forced deportation of children are testaments of such practices.
Imagine children, mere toddlers, who become a trump card in the hands of Russia, not knowing or remembering their true identity, whereabouts, families or relatives. We're talking about thousands of children being taken to Russia in a specific manner.
Children in occupied territories are gathered and transferred to assigned centres under the pretext of evacuation for unsubstantiated security reasons. Within days, children are moved via auto or rail transit to border regions of the Russian Federation where they are distributed to child care institutions in various regions of the Russian Federation. Relevant Russian authorities assign a guardian from among the employees of the administration of the child care institutions in order to launch the adoption procedures along with the change of citizenship and the transfer of deported children to Russian families.
While placed in the centres in the occupied territories, border regions of Russia or the child care institutions in Russia, Ukrainian children have restricted freedom of movement, meaning they are unable to leave the place, and they have a lack of contact with family members or relatives. Another practice relates to the transfer of Ukrainian children to occupied Crimea or various regions of the Russian Federation in the so-called recreation camps, some as far as Siberia and the east Pacific coast. Many facilities refuse to release them, citing invented so-called safety concerns.
As of today, we have information about more than 19,000 Ukrainian children being forcibly transferred to temporarily occupied territories and deported to Russia as we continue to trace and gather information about each and every child. So far only 387 children have been returned.
Apart from the ICC, this practice has been labelled and recognized as a war crime by the United Nations inquiry commission for Ukraine, the OSCE fact-finding mission and regional organizations like the Council of Europe.
Unfortunately, the crimes against Ukrainian children are neither random nor spontaneous. They are part of the Kremlin's widespread and systematic policy against the Ukrainian civilian population. Therefore, in our understanding, this practice constitutes a crime against humanity and could even amount to the crime of genocide through the forcible transfer of children. Russia does not stop with deportation and adoption processes. The grown-up Ukrainian children are forced to undergo so-called re-education into Russian. For teenage boys, this often includes militarization programs.
Last year a U.S. State Department-supported program depicted a network of 43 re-education camps in the Conflict Observatory report. Children are indoctrinated into the Kremlin's vision of nation, culture, history and society. It is part of Russia's planned policy aimed at smearing Ukrainian identity by robbing us of our children. A new four-day-old report has disclosed the involvement of the Government of Belarus in over 2,400 deported Ukrainian children undergoing political and military training in Dubrava and 12 other facilities in Belarus.
This is not new. Since 2014 the Russification policy has been heavily implemented in occupied territories through so-called re-education programs. Imagine the grotesque sight of children dressed in military-type uniforms glorifying the war through a Kremlin-distorted view of historical facts.
As the prosecutor general of Ukraine, my task is to secure full accountability for these heinous crimes on a national level while also fostering extensive use of international justice mechanisms. As the primary duty-bearer, we extensively investigate international crimes against children, including forced deportation and transfer cases. We're grateful to our partners for their unwavering support to the prosecution. We equally commend the office of the prosecutor of the ICC for their rigorous efforts, determination and steadfast progress in investigating.
More needs to be done by all of us. First, we need to implement effective modalities to counter this ill-fated practice. One such effort would be to include individuals and entities involved in or associated with the forced transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children into the sanctions regime.