association calls for legal action against Russian leaders for deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children

Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, is at the center of the complaint by the French association For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours, to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the association’s sights: 35 senior dignitaries of the regime. They are members of the presidential administration, ministers, executives of United Russia, the ruling party, or people occupying high positions in the occupied territories. What they have in common is having set up a relentless system of transfers of Ukrainian children to Russia.

“Everything was organized, planned, with the obvious desire to ‘Russify’ them to make them lose all connection with their country, their family, their history, even their spirituality, explains Emmanuel Daoud, the association’s lawyer. It’s called a war crime, a crime against humanity. And we think that it is a crime of genocide when we want to wipe out all or part of a nation.”

In Russian territory, these children undergo real militarization. “If Russia teaches these children to kill, as soon as they are fit to become soldiers, it will use them for further military aggressionwarns Vira Yastrebova, who heads a Ukrainian NGO and works in particular on the situation in the occupied territories. This is how the Kremlin regime uses drugs to stay in power.”

However, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to know today how many children are affected. Ukrainian authorities have documented just over 19,000 cases, but there could actually be hundreds of thousands. In March 2023, an arrest warrant had already been issued against the head of the Kremlin for the deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.