The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine released a statement condemning the recent decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin granting Russian citizenship to Ukrainian children.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that Putin’s decision is “aimed at addressing the demographic needs of the terrorist country to continue its war against Ukraine”, pointing out that the decree “grossly violates the legislation of our country, the norms of international law, and the rights of children who have been forcibly displaced to the territory of Russia”. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry also said that “Russia’s actions violate the norms of international humanitarian law and are meaningless, and the introduction of the relevant norm is aimed at depriving abducted children of the opportunity to return to their homeland”.
The ministry emphasised that all children who are Ukrainian citizens and were forcibly displaced to the territory of Russia under the false pretext of so-called ‘humanitarian protection’ will remain citizens of Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities insist that they continue taking all possible measures to protect these children’s legitimate rights and freedoms. Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also added that the “true value of this decree is that it will become another evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukraine and its people, as well as continued assimilation of Ukrainian children”.
The statement was released after Putin’s recent Order No. 11, “On determining certain categories of foreign citizens and stateless persons who have the right to apply for admission to the citizenship of the Russian Federation,” was signed on January 4.
This law dictates that orphaned children and children “left without parental care” who are citizens of Ukraine can obtain Russian citizenship based on Putin’s personal decree without fulfilling the standard requirements of Russian federal legislation. Such applications can be submitted by anyone from the management of Russian organisations supervising Ukrainian children forcibly deported from Ukraine to Russian territory by the Russian occupation authorities.
Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, stated that he would take all necessary measures to respond both domestically and on the international stage to Putin’s decree. Lubinets emphasised that the forced transfer of children from one national group to another through the enforced granting of citizenship may constitute another sign of genocide.
In November 2023, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Andriy Kostin, said that according to Ukraine’s official data, Russia deported more than 19,500 children from Ukraine to various regions of Russia and Belarus. Most of them are residents of the Donetsk region (13,600 children). Another 1,600 Ukrainian children were forcibly taken from the Kherson region, 1,300 from the Zaporizhzhia region, and 1,100 from the Luhansk region. Additionally, since February 2022, Ukrainian children have also been forcefully deported from the Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy regions.
Earlier, it was announced that Russia would begin granting citizenship to Ukrainians who were born and had permanently resided in Crimea before the annexation in 2014.
