Thanks to joint efforts under the President of Ukraine's Bring Kids Back UA action plan, with the mediation of the State of Qatar, three Ukrainian children who were in the TOT and Russia will be reunited with their families today.
Ukraine returned three children from TOT and Russia
On 16 December, three Ukrainian children previously abducted by Russia were returned to the territory of Ukraine.
This was reported by the Ombudsman of Ukraine Dmytro Lubinets on Telegram.
Today we have good news — three Ukrainian children have returned home.
Thanks to joint efforts under the President of Ukraine's Bring Kids Back UA action plan, with the mediation of the State of Qatar, three children will soon be reunited with their families and celebrate the holidays at home in Ukraine. We also involve NGOs and international partners in this process, Lubinets said.
The boy, born in 2008, and the girl, born in 2011, were taken from the Temporarily Occupied Territories (TOT) of the Kherson region, and both, the brother and sister, are already with their mother.
The third boy, born in 2011, is also with his mother. With the assistance of the Ombudsman's Office, the mother took him to the territory of Georgia. The boy wanted to return to Ukraine from Russia to his mother after his father arbitrarily took him with him.
Each return is a separate story and a special operation that people are working on. And their goal is to return all the children to their homeland. I am grateful to everyone who is helping to make this happen. We will fight for every Ukrainian child and return all of them, the Ombudsman emphasised.
What is known about the abduction of Ukrainian children
On Children's Day in 2023, the Online.UA team presented the documentary project Crippled Childhood, which tells the stories of Ukrainian children who were forcibly deported and abducted to Russia.
In the film Crippled Childhood, children and their parents openly share their stories: some of them have been in captivity, some have been forcibly taken to a "rehabilitation camp", some have been separated from their parents during so-called filtration measures.
It is important to understand that in more than a year and a half of full-scale war, Ukraine has managed to return less than 400 children. At the same time, Russia claims to have "evacuated" 744,000 Ukrainian children.
Since diplomacy with the aggressor country is not working, Russia continues to illegally take children from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
However, this is not an evacuation, as the Russians claim, but a mass abduction of underage Ukrainian citizens.
The project documents the testimonies of children about war crimes committed by Russia against the Ukrainian people.
