Dr. Kateryna Bondar Addresses UNHRC on the Plight of Ukrainian Children Affected by the Russian Invasion
March 20, 2024
Dr Kateryna Bondar, Main Representative to the UN Geneva WFUWO at the UN , delivered a video statement at the interactive dialogue with the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict during the UN Human Rights Council on 13 March 2024.
« We thank the Special Representative for her visit in Ukraine in May 2023. Children in Ukraine continue living in terrible reality, with psychological trauma due to loss of family members, hiding in bomb shelters, displacement, with risk for life due to Russian attacks on their homes, schools, hospitals, such as 2nd of March Russian night drone attack on apartment building in Odesa, killing 5 children from 4 months old to 10 years old.
Russian war crimes against children including forcible transfers and deportations have been committed in Crimea and Donbass since 2014 and have affected hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s children since February 2022 invasion. We are especially concerned about the fate of those 20,000 children, majority of whom have family in Ukraine, who were forcibly taken to the Russian Federation. These children are deprived of contact with their relatives for almost two years now, placed in Russian camps or institutions, where they are told that their parents abandoned them, imposed forced re-education and Russification and locked up in isolation cells or subject to other degrading treatment if they insist on their Ukrainian identity (as testimonies of the returned children show). Only some hundreds of them have been returned to Ukraine. While time is passing and more children are adopted into Russian families, it becomes more difficult or impossible to trace and return them.
What steps can the UN and other international organizations take to negotiate return, locate and save abducted Ukrainian children, and to stop the Russian genocidal policy of forcible transfer and deportation of Ukrainian population especially children?
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