Back in July 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin published a long treatise on the official Kremlin website in which he made the case for the “historical unity” of Russians and Ukrainians. In it, he argued that “the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians” was an alien concept promoted by foreign powers. He emphasized that “Ukraine and Russia have developed as a single economic system over decades and centuries.” And he made the case that Ukraine’s current, diminished global role was a natural consequence of its disconnection from Moscow.
All this was, of course, nonsense. But these falsehoods served as the intellectual foundation for Russia’s subsequent decision to re-invade Ukraine, and for its consistent attempts to conquer and subjugate it since. They were also something more. Embedded in Putin’s article, and evident throughout the current war, is the belief that Ukrainian national identity itself is an aberration that must be eliminated.
That’s why, over the past three-plus years, the Kremlin has made Ukraine’s children a key target of its aggression. According to European estimates, approximately 20,000 Ukrainian minors have been “forcibly deported to the Russian Federation and Belarus or detained in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories” since February 2022.
That, however, could be just the tip of the iceberg. The US Congress has noted that some estimates put the true number of abducted Ukrainian children an order of magnitude higher: as much as 200,000. Russian officials, meanwhile, have boasted that nearly three-quarters of a million Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia since the start of its full-scale invasion.
Some of them have been illegally adopted. Shortly after the start of the war, Putin signed a decreesimplifying the provision of citizenship to Ukrainian children “left without parental care.” That edict spurred a surge of so-called adoptions, as hundreds of Ukrainian children were placed with “patriotic” Russian families. American researchers have formally identified more than 300 Ukrainian children transferred to Russia “for coerced adoption and fostering,” though many believe the real figure is likely much higher.
Others are being sold. Russia’s occupation government in Luhansk, for instance, recently released a catalog of 294 Ukrainian children for adoption. The database sorts the children by traits such as eye color and lists character traits such as “obedient” or “calm.” Ukrainian human rights activists have called the database a “slave catalog” from which one could “order” a child with a “single click.”
Still others are being brainwashed. A new report from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab details that, since February 2022, Russia has transferred Ukrainian children from territories under its control into a vast network of facilities where those minors are systematically reeducated and militarized. The scope of the effort is massive. “Children from Ukraine have been taken to at least 210 locations in Russia and temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine,” The Yale study notes.
Those facilities range from hotels to “family support centers” to schools and universities. At most of them, Ukrainian children are exposed to re-education activities such as “cultural, patriotic, or military programming that aligns with pro-Russia narratives.” In a minority, those minors are made to do more, and are inducted into “militarization programs, including combat training, ceremonial parades and drills, assembly of drones and other materiel, and education in military history.”
Russia’s efforts follow a perverse logic. Not only do they help Russia to achieve Putin’s objective of eroding Ukrainian identity, they also serve a practical purpose by augmenting the ranks of the Russian military, which has struggled with chronic manpower shortages throughout the course of the current war.
Western governments, meanwhile, haven’t done much of substance in response. To be sure, the United Nations has labeled Russia’s deportation of children a “war crime.” In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin as well as Maria Lvova-Belova, his ironically named Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. The subject has likewise yielded resolutions, condemnations, and declarations by the European Parliament, the British government, and other international bodies. But meaningful international action has been hobbled by a lack of real leverage over the Kremlin and its conduct.
Here, Washington can help. President Trump is now talking tougher on Ukraine, but the White House clearly still holds out hope that negotiating a just peace between Moscow and Kyiv might be possible. To do that, however, the United States will need to fully grasp how Russia is targeting Ukraine’s future. And it will need to make a return of these innocents a core demand of its approach toward the Kremlin.
