Ukraine’s missing children

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 14th of August.

Thanks for listening to WORLD Radio! Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up on The World and Everything in It, Ukraine’s missing children.

On Friday, an American president will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time in four years.

BROWN: The leaders are expected to talk about ending the war in Ukraine, and human rights advocates want President Trump to raise another urgent issue: tens of thousands of abducted Ukrainian children still missing inside Russia.

WORLD’s Carolina Lumetta reports.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, between 19,000 and 35,000 children have gone missing from Ukrainian territory now in Russian control. The exact number is hard to pin down because Russia has been systematically erasing the children’s identities. And now, they’re showing up on Russian adoption websites.

RAYMOND: This is the single largest kidnapping in world history since World War II.

Nathaniel Raymond is the executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory. The lab houses the Conflict Observatory, an underground effort to track the abducted children.

RAYMOND: The critical breakthrough in December is that we identified three interconnected databases run by Russia, including their Ministry of Education. And they were putting children from Ukraine up for adoption and fostering through these databases, basically eBay for orphans.

As Russia inches closer to a Trump-imposed deadline to make peace with Ukraine, advocates say the return of the children needs to be central to any deal.

SOBOLIK: There's a renewed conversation right now on weapons to Ukraine. And so I'm looking for ways to publicly highlight talking about the children as well

Chelsea Sobolik is the director of government relations at World Relief, a Christian non-profit. World Relief led a coalition of faith leaders to send a letter of concern to the White House and the State Department in April.

SOBOLIK: We believe that families belong together. But then there's also a number of laws that govern the most vulnerable and that govern how citizens and how children are to be treated during times of war and conflict. And Russia is very actively violating those laws

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Geneva Conventions contain provisions on how to treat children during wartime. Typically, all adoptions are paused because there is no guarantee of appropriate oversight and paperwork. In the event that an enemy recovers children during a battle, they are supposed to notify the Red Cross and send them to a neutral third country. None of that has happened over the past three years.

SOBOLIK: In those cases, children should not be crossing borders, especially being taken by the aggressor in this case. So it's extraordinarily concerning.

Some of the missing children were forcibly sent to Russian summer camps before the war even started. In 2022, Russia changed its civil code to allow a Russian adult to renounce a child’s Ukrainian citizenship, even if their parents are still living. Instead of returning home, the Yale lab found that planes in Putin’s own fleet have flown children into Russia. The Yale lab also found photos of children with new names and birthdates on Russian adoption websites. Prospective parents can filter the options by physical characteristics and personality traits, like being respectful to adults. Here’s Raymond:

RAYMOND: It's not just about the kids in this war. It's about the kids in all the wars of the future to prevent there from being a green light to perpetrators of abduction crimes against children… If that happens, it rips a hole in the integrity of the Geneva Convention for generations to come.

The Yale lab’s research was previously funded by a State Department grant. The Department of State canceled the contract in March and then renewed it for six weeks to allow the lab to send its findings to Europol. It continues to operate through private donations but is petitioning for renewed federal funding.

In June, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota introduced the Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act. It would support Ukraine’s efforts to track and rehabilitate children when and if they return home. Congressman Robert Aderholt of Alabama also told WORLD in an office building hallway that the children are a top concern for the House.

ADERHOLT: This is totally unacceptable and that we need to make sure the administration is taking this to account when they're doing negotiations or trying to encourage negotiations between Ukraine and Russia

During a briefing on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt characterized Friday’s talks with Russia as a “listening exercise” and said the priority for Trump is ending the war in Ukraine. I asked her about the children.

LUMETTA: Is their return a red line for the president in any deal ending the war?

LEAVITT: … I don’t want to set red lines for the president on his behalf from this podium. However, the president did encourage Ukraine and Russia to speak directly to one another in terms of these humanitarian issues… and that remains a concern, but it’s one that Russia and Ukraine need to iron out together and why this president has encouraged them to speak.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and other Russian leaders due to the child abductions. Putin and Trump will meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, tomorrow. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was not invited to attend, but Trump said he would call him immediately after the talks.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta, in Washington.

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