Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attends a press conference in Odessa, Ukraine, October 13, 2023. Portal/Nina Liashonok/File Photo Acquire License Rights
LVIV, Ukraine, Nov 19 (Portal) – President Volodymyr Zelensky has imposed sanctions on 37 Russian groups and 108 people, including a former prime minister and a former education minister, saying his aim was to combat wartime abductions of children from Ukraine and other “Russian terror”.
“We are increasing our state’s pressure on them and each of them must be held accountable for what they have done,” he said in his nightly video address on Saturday after his office issued the corresponding decrees with his signature.
Zelensky did not associate specific individuals or groups with specific wrongdoings. The decrees imposed a series of 10-year sentences against individuals and five-year sentences against non-profit groups, including one referred to in English as the “Russian Children’s Foundation.”
Zelensky said in his speech that the list included “those involved in the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories” and people who “support Russian terror against Ukraine in various ways.”
Some of the newly sanctioned individuals, including many with Russian citizenship, had previously been punished with separate or similar penalties.
They included Dmytro Tabachnyk, a former education and science minister whose Ukrainian citizenship was revoked in February, and ex-prime minister Mykola Azarov.
Together with former President Viktor Yanukovych, Azarov had previously had assets and property frozen, among other things. The two men fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 after more than 100 demonstrators were killed in street protests in Kiev.
Others punished Saturday included Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed head of Crimea, and Leonid Pasechnik, whom Putin named head of Luhansk, the eastern Ukrainian region annexed by Russia in 2022.
The sanctioned Russian groups included several whose names or websites suggested they worked with children.
One sanctioned group was called Kvartal Lui, which corresponds to an organization with a website named as its founder by children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, who herself was sanctioned by Kyiv in October 2022.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant this month for Lvova-Belova and President Vladimir Putin, accusing them of the war crime of deporting children from Ukraine.
Zelensky’s new list also sanctioned Kvartal Lui’s executive director, Sofia Lvova-Belova. Their older sister, Maria Lvova-Belova, said the children were brought to protect them from violence and denied committing war crimes.
Kiev says about 20,000 children were deported to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without the consent of their family members or guardians, which it says constitutes a war crime that meets the UN treaty’s definition of genocide.
Yale University released research Thursday that showed more than 2,400 children between the ages of six and 17 were also housed in 13 facilities in Russian-allied Belarus.
The report, by a group that receives US State Department funding, said the shipments across Russian territory to its western neighbor were “ultimately coordinated between Putin and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.”
Zelensky’s decrees confirmed a decision by the National Security and Defense Council to impose sanctions with a range of penalties, including the freezing of assets, trade, transit, leasing, capital withdrawal, land purchases and other financial and economic activities.
Written by Elaine Monaghan in Washington, Editing by Franklin Paul
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