Ukraine Brings Back Five Children from Russian Occupied Territories

Five children have been reunited with their families and returned from Russian occupied Ukrainian territories thanks to Qatari mediation, the head of the Ukrainian President’s office said on Saturday.

The children are aged between 11 and 16 years old and were returned from Russian-occupied of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions, Ukraine’s Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said.

Andrii Yermak, the head of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said in a post on X that the children were brought back under the Bring Kids Back UA initiative in coordination with the Ombudsman’s office.

One of the children, a 10-year-old boy, was staying with his sick grandmother while his mother was away in another city when the full-scale invasion by Russian forces began. The mother’s individual attempts to retrieve her child were unsuccessful.

In another case, a 12-year-old girl whose parents are divorced and whose father is held in Russian captivity has been relocated by the Russians several times since the invasion started. The ordeal caused a severe decline in her health, both physical and mental. She will now be in the custody of her grandmother, receiving support from the authorities.

Other children in the group were subjected to “psychological pressure, threats of deportation, and restrictions on education under the Russian curriculum,” the Ukrainian UNITED24 Media news website reported.

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In February, Yermak said the mass deportations of Ukrainian children from occupied territories began soon after the Russian full-scale invasion.

So far, 1,221 children have been successfully returned from Russian captivity. Yermak stressed, that the Russian kidnapping of Ukrainian children amounts to a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Bring Kids Back UA is a humanitarian program launched by Zelenskyy in 2023. Its objectives include returning and reintegrating the children, aiding their social adaptation, promoting family-based care and documenting crimes for international accountability, including actions at the International Criminal Court.

Earlier, four Ukrainian teenagers were repatriated from Russian-occupied territories under the initiative. This group included a 14-year-old girl who was denied medical care because of her Ukrainian citizenship and a 16-year-old boy, the son of a Ukrainian soldier, who endured interrogation and forced military registration.