On 16 November, Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab published a report on Russia’s systematic campaign of children’s deportation from Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories to Belarus. According to this report, since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2024, at least 2,442 Ukrainian children between the ages of 6 and 17 have been illegally relocated to the so-called ‘rehabilitation’ facilities in Belarus.
Researchers from Yale University have estimated that from September 2022 to May 2023, more than 2,000 Ukrainian children were forcefully transferred to the Dubrava Children’s Centre in the Minsk region in Belarus; another 392 children were sent to 12 other institutions. According to the report, children were deported from at least 17 Ukrainian cities, including Khartsyzsk, Makiivka, Yenakiieve, Horlivka, Shakhtarske, Donetsk, Mariupol, Volnovakha, Ilovaisk, Berdianske, Debaltseve and Lysychansk.
Yale’s report demonstrates Belarus’ complicity in Russia’s systematic campaign of child deportation. According to the report, Belarus facilitated “Russia’s systematic efforts to identify, gather, transport, and re-educate Ukrainian children”. The researchers note that the transportation of children was coordinated by the representatives of the presidents of Russia and Belarus, Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko.
According to the report, at least six groups of Ukrainian children were undergoing unlawful military training in Belarus, including training in its internal security services, the Internal Troops of Belarus. Lukashenko funded and approved the use of both state and non-state actors to transport children from Ukraine to Belarus, the Yale University report said. These included officials and organisations in Russia and Belarus, such as pro-regime civil society organisations, ultranationalist militant extremist groups or state-owned industrial companies. The report also said the so-called ‘re-education’ activities included the promotion of propaganda messages in support of Belarus’s and Russia’s political interests.
Earlier this year, Lukashenko confirmed that Ukrainian children from the occupied territories are being transported to Belarus for, as he described it, ‘rehabilitation’ and claimed that “Ukrainian children needed peace”.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Andriy Kostin, said during the live stream at Ukraine’s United News telethon that according to Ukraine’s official data, overall, 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.
The statistics presented by Andriy Kostin only account for those children whose data have been officially corroborated and verified; the real number of deported children is expected to be much higher. Numbers cited by Russia are immensely higher – Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, who was earlier charged with war crimes by ICJ and issued an international arrest warrant for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children, claimed that until now, Russians have “relocated” over 700,000 Ukrainian children to Russia.
Several days ago, Ukrainian social media users were sharing the story of a 17-year-old Ukrainian boy from Mariupol who managed to return to Ukraine after being ‘evacuated’ to Russia. After Russian troops occupied his hometown, Bogdan Yermokhin, an orphan from the temporarily occupied Mariupol, was first ‘evacuated’ to Donestk and then to the Moscow region. In Russia, authorities placed him into the foster care of a Russian family. Yermokhin was given Russian citizenship but managed to retain his Ukrainian passport. He tried to escape Russia in March of this year, but his attempt was unsuccessful. His case went viral after Russian authorities sent him a conscription notice telling him to join the Russian army.
