Six Ukrainian children abducted by Russia after the invasion of Ukraine will be reunited with their families after mediation from Qatar, the country’s authorities announced.
Moscow is accused of having expelled thousands of children from the occupied Ukrainian territories since February 2022.
This group of children aged between 8 and 15 is the second to be repatriated under an agreement negotiated between the two countries via Qatar. Last October, four minors abducted by the Putin regime were returned to their families.
The children were gathered at the Qatari embassy in Moscow, from where they will leave for Kiev via Minsk. Officials said they were accompanied by Qatari diplomats to the border with Ukraine.
One of them is an 11yearold boy whose mother, a Ukrainian soldier, is still imprisoned in Russia. He is looked after by his aunt in Kiev.
Another, eight years old, had been living with his grandmother in Kremennaya in eastern Ukraine since March 2022. He met his mother in the Russianoccupied city of Luhansk before heading to Moscow and then Kiev.
Ukraine accuses Russia of organizing the “deportation” of thousands of Ukrainian children to its territory, prompting the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges. These allegations are rejected by the Kremlin, which claims it wants to protect these children from the fighting.
On September 19, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky denounced at the UN General Assembly that Russia is abducting children from Ukrainian territories that Moscow has invaded to put pressure on their families and indoctrinate them to hate the country.
In July 2023, Russian parliamentarian Grigori Karasin said Moscow had removed around 700,000 children from the conflict zone. At that time, Kiev accused the Kremlin of committing war crimes by kidnapping minors.