(NewsNation) — Russia’s open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russians has been well underway since the war began, but now, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is shedding new light on just how difficult a process it is to try and bring them home.
“We cannot reach an agreement with (Russia) on the return of children,” Zelenskyy told NewsNation’s Robert Sherman. “We negotiate through other countries that carry out mediation missions. The most successful have been the Qataris. So far, they’ve been helping us.”
Thousands of children have been found in the basements of war-torn cities like Mariupol and at orphanages in the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donbas. They include those whose parents were killed by Russian shelling as well as others in institutions or with foster families known as “children of the state.”
Russia claims that these children don’t have parents or guardians to look after them or that they can’t be reached. But an Associated Press investigation found that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren’t wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda and given them Russian families and citizenship.
Zelenskyy said the Vatican has also been successful in helping Ukrainian children make it back home, with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi leading this process under Pope Francis and now Pope Leo.
“We hand over lists of children, and they help us,” said Zelenskyy. “At the level of ombudsmen — for example, the Ukrainian and the Russian ones — this is unfortunately still impossible.”
Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children without the consent of the home country, which Ukraine has not given. But in May, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Russia to adopt and give citizenship to Ukrainian children without parental care — and harder for Ukraine and surviving relatives to win them back.
Russia also has prepared a register of suitable Russian families for Ukrainian children and pays them for each child who gets citizenship — up to $1,000 for those with disabilities. It holds summer camps for Ukrainian orphans, offers “patriotic education” classes and even runs a hotline to pair Russian families with children from Donbas.
Kidnappings of children resemble World War II
One observer of these negotiations has compared Russia’s actions to those of the Nazis nearly 80+ years ago.
“The scale of this set of crimes is basically unheard of since World War II, when the Nazis abducted tens of thousands of Polish children in what was the basis of the eight Nuremberg Trials,” said Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of Yale`s Humanitarian Research Lab.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition politician, supported Raymond’s remarks, saying, “There are thousands of people’s lives that are at stake in any of these negotiations.”
“We are not hearing enough about this.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Robert Sherman
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.newsnationnow.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
