(Reuters) – Moscow is working on bringing 16 children to Russia from Ukraine and plans to reunite 10 children with relatives in Ukraine, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights told RIA agency in remarks published on Wednesday.
“We have a clear presidential mandate that we work only with full-fledged legal representatives, that is, relatives, parents who have legal force and can take care of their children,” commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova told RIA in an interview.
She said that through those channels, at the moment 95 children have been reunited with their relatives in Ukraine, and 17 children have returned to Russia.
Moscow and Kyiv have carried out several exchanges of children for reunification with their families since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Kyiv has brought back 1,277 children so far, according to data published by Ukraine’s Ministry of Reintegration, including through non-governmental agencies and separate initiatives.
Ukraine says over 19,500 children have been taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without the consent of family or guardians during the war, calling the abductions a war crime that meets the U.N. treaty definition of genocide.
Russia has said it has been evacuating people voluntarily and to protect vulnerable children from the war zone.
According to data released last week by the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, about 10.6 million people have been forced from their homes, seeking safety either within Ukraine or abroad since the start of the war.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Lvova-Belova and President Vladimir Putin related to the abduction of Ukrainian children. Russia denounced the warrants as “outrageous and unacceptable”.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Michael Perry)
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