On February 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. He commended Lvova-Belova for her work on implementing the state-organized deportation of Ukrainian kids and their adoption by Russians, which, , amounts to protecting the rights of the children as “our citizens”:
That is false.
Children from Ukraine’s Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are Ukrainian citizens. The Russian authorities their forcible deportation to Russia and adoption by Russians. That, according the U.S. State Department, as defined by , a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians.
Russia began systematically to Russia a few days before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. It justified doing so by citing the alleged threat of an offensive by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the country’s eastern Donbas region.
Russian government officials centrally manage and other institutions to which children from Ukraine . The United States, European Union and United Kingdom have for her role in the deportations.
Under the , adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948, “[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Article II, (e)).
On September 7, 2022, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ilze Brands Kehris there were credible allegations that unaccompanied Ukrainian children were being forcibly transferred to Russia. She said that Russian authorities had “adopted a simplified procedure to grant Russian citizenship to children without parental care” so that they could be sent, in violation of international law, for adoption by Russian families:
On February 14, the , an American non-governmental organization funded by , issued titled “Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-education and Adoption of Ukraine's Children.”
Based on satellite imagery, a six-month archive of documentation, and statements from families on both sides, concluded that:
On February 19, U.S. Secretary of State CBS News' "Face the Nation" program that Washington had received enough evidence to assert that Russia had committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine, including children being forcibly separated from their families, which international tribunals regard as genocide:
Russia parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, and parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in 2022. On September 30, 2022, it had annexed these four Ukrainian regions.
On October 12, 2022, the a resolution condemning Russia's "illegal so-called referendums in regions within the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine and the attempted illegal annexation” of the four regions of Ukraine.
The assembly declared that Russia’s “attempted illegal annexation” of Ukrainian regions under international law. The resolution was supported by 143 of the U.N.’s 193 member states, while five voted against it and 35 abstained.