By Olha Chepil | 2023-12-04

KYIV -- Ukrainian children carried away to Russia and Belarus may become victims of human trafficking, human rights activists and officials warn.

Since the first days of the Kremlin's full-scale aggression against Ukraine, the Russians have taken more than 2,000 Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Belarus.

Those children remain highly vulnerable to human trafficking, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a briefing on November 20.

"We don't know whether the children who are deported to Russia or Belarus are being exploited further, but they remain highly vulnerable ... to human trafficking," Miller told reporters.

Belarus is complicit in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, added Miller.

Officially, the children are taken from occupied territories to Belarus "for convalescence," but in reality nobody knows what happens to them after they cross the border.

"These Ukrainian children who are being taken away have no rights. These children are defenseless. Neither Russia nor Belarus is providing the Ukrainians, or anyone at all, with information about them," said Olha Yerokhina, a spokesperson for Save Ukraine, the only NGO that regularly organizes operations to retrieve Ukrainian children taken to Russia.

To date, nobody has inquired about the the children in Belarus rather than in Russia, Yerokhina told Kontur, suggesting that their parents may be trapped in Russian-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, intimidated or dead.

The deported Ukrainian children who are orphans or without guardians in particular "are in great danger" as they have no one to look for them, she said.

Crime against humanity

Estimates of the number of Ukrainian children who have been taken to Belarus vary.

Approximately 3,500 Ukrainian children are now living in Belarus, according to the Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR) in Kyiv, a number confirmed by Belarusian officials.

The Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) in a November report said that it had found that at least 2,442 children have been taken from Ukraine to Belarus since February 24, 2022.

Children from Ukraine between the ages of 6 and 17 were transported from occupied Ukraine to Dubrava and 12 other facilities in Belarus, where many of them are undergoing political and cultural "re-education, including military training" in the interests of Belarus and Russia, according to the report.

Children were taken from no less than 17 cities of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces and the practice is constant, it said.

"Properly speaking, they are trying to give the Ukrainian children a full ideological 'reboot,'" Sergei Bulba, director of the NGO Belarus 2.0: Robimo razom (Let's Work Together), told Kontur.

"Their whole ideology is based on the idea that we are Slavs, we are all together here, we are together with Russia, and Russia is good."

The same propaganda holds that a "junta" seized power in Kyiv, he said.

"The main problem is not that they are being taken out," Kateryna Rashevska, a legal analyst with the RCHR, told Kontur.

"Rather, the problem is that they are being re-educated, militarized. This is all discriminatory persecution."

"It's a crime against humanity," said Rashevska.

'They are all involved'

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka personally co-ordinate the movement of children from occupied Ukraine to Belarus, say observers.

Both Russian and Belarusian intelligence services help implement the program.

"Lukashenka has committed every organization to finance the deportation of Ukrainian children, including the Soligorsk Potash Plant and the Belarusian Metallurgical Factory... All state-owned enterprises -- everyone has been forced to finance these so-called 'convalescence visits' for Ukrainian children," said Bulba.

Offenders include Belaruskali, the country's largest potash fertilizer producer, and the Belarusian Republican Youth Union, as well as various ultranationalist motorcycle clubs are also involved, according to Yale HRL.

Ukrainian authorities have also accused Alyaksei Talai, a Belarusian celebrity and paralympic swimmer who runs a charity foundation, of playing no small role in the illegal deportation of children.

"Of course, the person primarily responsible for all this in Belarus is Lukashenka. But we should not ignore the role of other people, including those at the top: Russian Ambassador to Belarus Dmitry Mezentsev, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, and ... Alyaksei Talai," said Rashevska.

"They are all involved," she said.

In March 2022, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for illegally deporting Ukrainian children.

Members of the European Parliament had also previously asked for a similar arrest warrant to be issued for Lukashenka.

Pavel Latushko, deputy chief of the United Transitional Cabinet and director of National Anti-Crisis Management (both of which are "shadow" government-like organizations for Belarus), said on November 24 that his lawyers have already proven Lukashenka's role in war crimes related to the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children.

The case files have been brought in, handed over and analyzed. The International Criminal Court will consider the matter in the future, he said.