Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian President Vladimir Putin faces criminal charges for the “unlawful deportation and transfer of children”.
That is the definition of the 2023 arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, the intergovernmental tribunal based in The Hague.
On June 2, as ceasefire talks rumbled on, Ukrainian diplomats handed their Russian counterparts a list of hundreds of children that they said were taken from Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions since 2022.
The return of these children “could become the first test of the sincerity of [Russia’s] intentions” to reach a peace settlement, Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, told media. “The ball is in Russia’s corner.”
But Ukraine claims the number of children taken by Russia is much higher. Kyiv has so far identified 19,546 children who it says were forcibly taken from Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions since 2022.
The list could be far from final, as Ukrainian officials believe that some children lost their parents during the hostilities and cannot get in touch with their relatives in Ukraine.
As of early June, only 1,345 children had returned home to Ukraine.
But why did Russia take them in the first place?
“The aim is genocide of the Ukrainian people through Ukrainian children,” Daria Herasymchuk, a presidential adviser on children’s rights, told Al Jazeera. “Everybody understands that if you take children away from a nation, the nation will not exist.”
Putin, his allies and Kremlin-backed media insist that Ukraine is an “artificial state” with no cultural and ethnic identity.
Russian officials who run orphanages, foster homes and facilitate adoptions are being accused of changing the Ukrainian children’s names to deprive them of access to relatives.
“Russians do absolutely everything to erase the children’s identity,” Herasymchuk said.
The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicising and building cases of alleged war crimes Russia commits in Ukraine, said “indoctrination” is at play.
“The system is in the aspects of indoctrination, the re-education of children, when they are deprived of a certain identity that they had in Ukraine, and another identity, a Russian one, is imposed upon them,” Viktoria Novikova, the Reckoning Project’s senior researcher, told Al Jazeera.
Russia’s ultimate goal is to “turn their enemy, the Ukrainians, into their friend, so that these children think that Ukraine is an enemy so that [Russia] can seize all of Ukraine”, she said.
A group of researchers at Yale University that helps locate the children agrees that the alleged abductions “may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
Moscow conducts a “systematic campaign of forcibly moving children from Ukraine into Russia, fracturing their connection to Ukrainian language and heritage through ‘re-education’, and even disconnecting children from their Ukrainian identities through adoption,” said the Humanitarian Research Laboratory of the Yale School of Public Health.
The group has located some 8,400 children in five dozen facilities in Russia and Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally.
In 2022, Sergey Mironov, head of A Just Russia, a pro-Kremlin party, adopted a 10-month-old girl named Marharyta Prokopenko, according to the Vaznye Istorii online magazine.
The girl was taken from an orphanage in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson that was occupied at the time. Her name was changed to Marina Mironova, the magazine reported.
The girl’s name is on the June 2 list.
The alleged abductions are far from “chaotic” and follow detailed scenarios, Herasymchuk said.
She said some children are taken from parents who refuse to collaborate with Moscow-installed “administrations” in Russia-occupied areas.
During this “filtration” procedure, she alleged that Russian intelligence and military officers and Ukrainian collaborators interrogate and “torture” the parents, checking their bodies for pro-Ukrainian tattoos or bruises left by recoiling firearms.
Viktoria Obidina, a 29-year-old military nurse taken prisoner after failing a “filtration” that followed the 2022 siege of the southern city of Mariupol, feared such an abduction.
She also thought that her daughter Alisa, who was four at the time, would witness her torture and then end up in a Russian orphanage.
“They could have tortured me near her or could have tortured her to make me do things,” Obidina told Al Jazeera after her release from Russian captivity in September 2022.
Instead, she opted to hand Alisa to a complete stranger, a civilian woman who had already undergone the “filtration” process and boarded a bus that took 10 days of endless stops and checks amid shelling and shooting to reach a Kyiv-controlled area.
Another alleged method is “summer camping”, in which children in Russia-occupied areas are taken to Crimea or Russian cities along the Black Sea coast and are not returned to their parents, Herasymchuk claimed.
Some parents plunge into the abyss of trying to reach Russia to get their kids back.
But very few succeed, as Ukrainians trying to enter Russia are often barred from re-entry.
Attempts to return a child are “always a lottery”, Herasymchuk said.
Children of preschool age often do not remember their addresses and do not know how to reach out to their relatives, while teenagers are more inventive, she said.
Ukrainian boys are especially vulnerable as they are seen as future soldiers who could fight against Ukraine, she said.
“All the boys undergo militarisation, they get summons from Russian conscription offices so that they become Russian soldiers and return to Ukraine,” she said.
A return is often more feasible through a third nation such as Qatar, whose government has helped get dozens of children back home.
On Wednesday, Russia’s children’s rights ombudswoman said she had received the list of 339 Ukrainian children. She denied that Russia had abducted tens of thousands of children.
“We see that there aren’t 20,000-25,000 children; the list contains only 339 [names], and we will work thoroughly on each child,” Maria Lvova-Belova told the Tass news agency.
In 2022, Lvova-Belova adopted a 15-year-old boy from Ukraine’s Mariupol.
Along with Putin, she is wanted by the International Criminal Court for her role in the alleged abductions.
Ukrainian observers hope that the children’s return may be one of the few positive things to come out of the stalled Ukraine-Russia peace talks, which were last held in Turkiye’s Istanbul.
“Once everyone understands that no ceasefire is discussed in Istanbul, the Ukrainian side is trying to squeeze things out maximally out of the humanitarian track,” Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.
