Russian ombudswoman says more than 700,000 children taken from Ukraine since February 2022

A new report from Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova says that Russia has “taken in” approximately 4.8 million residents of Ukraine since February 2022, including more than 700,000 children.

“The overwhelming majority of minors arrived with their parents or other relatives,” writes Lvova-Belova, who is subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for her alleged role in the illegal deportations of children from Ukraine to Russia.

According to the report, the number includes 1,500 children who lived in orphanages and other institutions and whose legal representatives were the institutions’ directors. It notes that 288 children from the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” were “subsequently placed under the care of Russian foster families.” It also says that children from the “Luhansk People’s Republic” were returned to their institutions, but that 92 children who remained without parental care were placed in the custody of “Russian foster families” as well.

Additionally, the ombudswoman writes that in the late summer and fall of 2022, “because of the circumstances on the front line,” parents from Ukraine’s Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv regions, among others, “voluntarily sent children on vacation, in some cases to protect them from military operations.”

“They were sent, with chaperones and under agreements with their parents, to health resorts and recreational and rehabilitative organizations in Crimea and the Krasnodar region,” the report continues.

The Ukrainian project Children of War has documented approximately 19,500 cases of minors being forcibly deported from Ukraine. According to the independent outlet iStories, the Russian authorities have put more than 1,000 Ukrainian children under “protective custody.”