During the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia has forcibly transferred almost 20,000 Ukrainian children to areas under its control, assigned them Russian citizenship, forcibly adopted them into Russian families, and created obstacles for their reunification with their parents and homeland. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for President of Russia Vladimir Putin (who has explicitly supported the forced adoptions, including by enacting legislation to facilitate them) and Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their alleged involvement. According to international law, including the 1948 Genocide Convention, such acts constitute genocide if done with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a nation or ethnic group.
Ukrainian children have been abducted by the Russian state after their parents had been arrested by Russian occupation authorities or killed in the invasion, or after becoming separated from their parents in an active war zone. Children have also been abducted from Ukrainian state institutions in occupied areas, and through children's "summer camps" on Russian territory. The abducted children have been subject to Russification; raising children of war in a foreign nation and culture may constitute an act of genocide if intended to erase their national identity.
Ukrainian authorities have verified the identities of over 19,000 abducted children, compiling and actively updating the data as part of an online platform: "Children of War". Russian authorities have claimed that over 700,000 Ukrainian children have been transferred by mid-2023, and Ukraine's ombudsman on children's rights believes that the actual number of abducted children may be in the hundreds of thousands. A charitable organisation, Save Ukraine, facilitates the repatriation and family reunification of abducted Ukrainian children.
In August 2025, Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine created an internet based catalogue where Russians can choose Ukrainian children based on photos and descriptions like "obedient" or "calm", and filtering by age, eye color and hair color. A UN inquiry found Russian forces guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, consisting of forcible transfer, deportation and enforced disappearance.
History
2010s Russia started transferring children from Ukrainian territories in 2014, the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The first such large-scale program was initiated by Russian charity celebrity Elizaveta Glinka. In early February 2022, Russia "evacuated" 500 supposed orphans from Donetsk Oblast to Russian territory.
2022 The first reports of forced deportations to Russia as part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine came mid-March 2022, during the siege of Mariupol. The same month, Russian children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova has stated that a group of Ukrainian children transferred to Russia from Mariupol had initially asserted their Ukrainian identity, but that it had since transformed into a love for Russia, saying that she had adopted one of the children herself.
On 22 March, Ukraine and U.S. authorities claimed more than 2,300 children had been kidnapped by Russian forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.
On 30 May, Vladimir Putin signed a decree that streamlined the process of adopting Ukrainian orphans or those without parental care and giving them Russian citizenship.
By 11 April, two-thirds of Ukraine's 7.5 million children had been displaced according to the U.N. Ukraine's human rights commissioner, Lyudmila Denysova, and U.N. ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya, stated at that time that more than 120,000 children had been deported to Russia. By 26 May, more than 238,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported to Russian territory.
Ukraine raised the issue at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in early June, where the head of Ukraine's mission, Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk, quoted a message from a Ukrainian child who had been forcibly adopted despite having close living relations; addressed to his aunt, it read, in part, "They say I'm an orphan. But I'm not an orphan, I have you, I have grandparents. There are so many children like me here. They say they want to leave us in Russia. And I don't want to stay in Russia!"
According to Ukrainska Pravda, Russia has taken 267 orphans from Mariupol to Rostov to be made Russian citizens, supervised by Maria Lvova-Belova. It also reported that Russian authorities had looked for and collected orphaned children, to be taken to an unknown destination.
Sky News released CCTV footage dated June of Russian FSB officials entering an orphanage in Kherson to search for orphans. Aware of the risk of child abductions, the staff hid the children prior to their arrival. Finding the orphanage empty, the FSB agents seized records, computers, and the CCTV system from the orphanage in an apparent effort to track down the missing children. Russian authorities subsequently sent 15 abducted children to be housed in the orphanage, only to be taken away by the Russian occupiers as they retreated from Kherson. Russian forces also successfully abducted children from a different Kherson orphanage, an eyewitness told Sky News.
In June, Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, claimed 1,936,911 Ukrainians had been deported to Russia, of whom 307,423 were children.
On 7 September a United Nations official reported that there were credible accusations that Russian forces had sent Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption as part of a forced deportation programme, and the US ambassador informed the UN Security Council that more than 1,800 Ukrainian children had been transferred to Russia in July alone.
Child abduction during "filtration" procedures was documented in a 10 November Amnesty International report entitled "Russia’s Unlawful Transfer And Abuse Of Civilians In Ukraine During 'Filtration'". An 11-year-old boy testified to Amnesty International:
In December, a report published by the Eastern Human Rights Group and the Institute for Strategic Research and Security concluded that the deportations in Donbas were prepared by the Russian Federation under the guise of "evacuation" ahead of time.
2023 As early as 28 April 2023 the abductions were a matter of interest at the UNSC.
According to an August Reuters report, Alexei Petrov, an aide to the office of Russia's presidential commissioner for children's rights, had employed neo-Nazi rhetoric and symbols in his online activity, and associated himself with neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Russian far-right movements online.
2024 On 2 February 2024 the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children launched itself with 37 partner nations. It was co-chaired by Ukraine and Canada.
In February NPR interviewed two formerly kidnapped children after they had been heard by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Later during the 118th United States Congress, Rep Susan Wild proposed H.Res 149: "Condemning the illegal abduction and forcible transfer of children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation"; it earned 39 co-sponsors. The House agreed to the resolution on March 19, 2024, passing it by a vote of 390 to 9. The members voting against the resolution were: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tom Tiffany, Eric Burlison, Andy Biggs, Clay Higgins, Thomas Massie, Matt Rosendale, Warren Davidson, and Chip Roy.
In June Ukrainians became aware that Russia had placed photographs of several of the abductees in an online format.
2025 In October 2025 it was announced by United States First Lady Melania Trump that due to ongoing talks with Putin she had assisted in the reunification of eight children that had been "displaced". Per Trump, three of the eight children had been separated from their families and "displaced" into Russia due to front line fighting, while the remainder were separated from family members across borders due to the fighting.
Abductions The vast majority of the abducted children have been abducted from southern and eastern Ukraine (Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Mykolaiv regions). According to Ukraine's ombudsman on children's rights, Russia is carrying out the abductions with the goal of supplementing its own population, and that Russia is conducting health examinations on the children in order to integrate only healthy Ukrainian children into the Russian nation.
Parental separation Some children have been abducted after becoming separated from their parents while fleeing active war zones, and some have been abducted after their parents were detained in filtration camps. Some children have been abducted and taken to Russia by family friends or relatives seeking financial and material gain from incentives instituted by the Russian state intended to promote adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian families. Ukraine's ombudsman on children's rights has alleged that Russian occupation authorities have used abductions as a punitive measure against parents who disobey occupation authorities, revoking their parental rights as punishment for dissent. Some children are abducted by Russian authorities after their parents are killed by Russian forces, Ukrainian officials have said.
State institutions Children have been abducted from Ukrainian state-run institutions such as orphanages, group homes, care homes, hospitals, and boarding schools; many of the forcibly transferred children were taken from orphanages and group homes. State institutions furthermore lost track of thousands of children in their care amid the turmoil of the war.
Most children in the care of Ukrainian state institutions (including some of those in orphanages) are not orphans but were only temporarily or permanently placed under the care of the state by parents facing personal hardships such as poverty, illness, or addiction. The Ukrainian state facilitates the voluntary temporary or permanent placement of children under the care of state institutions by parents. Some 90% of Ukrainian children living under state care were thus "social orphans" – children with family members who are for various reasons unable to care for them. The United Nations estimated that some 90,000 children resided in state-run homes in Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion. Regardless of whether the children had living parents or were indeed wards of the state, such forced transfers during wartime likely constitute a war crime.
The BBC said that many of the abducted children were sent to "re-education camps or psychiatric hospitals" in Russia. The Yale School of Public Health has documented a “systematic” effort to brainwash the Ukrainian children.
Summer camp stays Parents in Russian-occupied areas have been encouraged by Russian occupation authorities, Russian forces, and teachers to send their children to so-called "summer camps" (in fact re-education camps for Ukrainian children) for a respite from the Russo-Ukrainian war. Some parents were pressured to allow their children to go to the camps, while others agreed in order to get their children out of an active war zone, or to take advantage of an opportunity to provide them a free trip (many families that agreed to send their children were economically disadvantaged) or better living conditions amid the ravages of war.