A display of 20,000 teddy bears appeared on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Thursday to represent Ukrainian children who have been forcibly taken to Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, AFP reported.
The demonstration, organized by Razom for Ukraine and the American Coalition for Ukraine, was held near the US Capitol under the message: “Bring Them Home.”
Melinda Haring, senior advisor for Razom for Ukraine, said the display was meant to show the scale of the abductions.
“There are 20,000 teddy bears on this fence,” Haring said. “Each of these teddy bears represents a Ukrainian child that was taken since 2022. Now, there’s officially about 20,000 Ukrainian children. The number is definitely larger than that, but we’re here to draw attention to Vladimir Putin and what he did to Ukrainian children.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, Olha Stefanishyna, urged lawmakers to keep pressure on the issue.
“We urge our colleagues from the Senate and Congress not to forget, to keep this wheel running,” Stefanishyna said. “Your attention, your energy keeps the attention of your government on the topic.”
US Senator Richard Blumenthal called the abductions a war crime.
“What Putin is doing to tens of thousands of children, more than 20,000, is a war crime,” Blumenthal said. “What Vladimir Putin is doing here is not trying to take territory alone. He’s not trying to defeat a nation alone. He’s trying to destroy a people.”
He said that was the purpose of “abducting children, changing their names, re-educating them.”
According to Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, profiles of children abducted from southern Ukraine’s Kherson have appeared on Russian adoption portals, while official pages of Russia’s state-sanctioned youth paramilitary groups have shown the inclusion of teens from occupied Ukraine.
US lawmakers, including Blumenthal, Jamie Raskin and Michael McCaul, attended the event and urged continued pressure on Russia.
In February, President Volodymyr Zelensky said 2,000 Ukrainian children had been brought back from Russia and Russian-occupied territories, but thousands more remained “captive.”
In March, the US announced a $25 million fund to support the return and rehabilitation of Ukrainian children.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner over the alleged unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children.