Children for the elite: how Russians adopt small Ukrainians

Like the Nazis 80 years ago, Russian officials are taking deported children into their families. Why this process has become state policy and what it really is – read in the author’s column for Channel 24.

The number of identified adoption cases is increasing

Despite attempts to portray the transfer to families as a temporary humanitarian action, the truth is seeping into the public space.

About 1000 children from Crimea, 29 children from Luhansk region, 1 child from Donetsk region, 1 child from Kherson region were illegally adopted by Russian citizens. According to the information provided by the Belarusian opposition, another 12 children were probably transferred to Belarusian families.

Despite the secrecy of adoption and the extremely complicated process of obtaining evidence, positive decisions of Russian courts are becoming known. Ukrainian children’s names and place of birth are changed. At the same time, minors partially appear in the register maintained by the National Information Bureau of Ukraine, and which is known, in particular, to the commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova.

Russian agents do not take into account the fact that children are wanted by relatives and competent authorities of the state of citizenship. Not only that, their own “headquarters” for finding blood relatives of children do not fulfill their powers properly.

Special procedure

According to the Russian Institute for the Development of Family Arrangements, on average, the procedure for adopting a child lasts from several months to 2 years. At the same time, issuing a court decision takes from 10 to 60 days. In the case regarding the adoption of Margarita Prokopenko, according to information from the official website of the Podilsk City Court of the Moscow Region, the trial lasted a record 7 days (from November 15 to 22, 2022).

In Ukraine, adoption takes several years on average. Even in connection with the martial law, it was decided not to speed up the procedure in order to respect the best interests of the child and to properly consider the case. At the same time, during a full-scale invasion, a kind of moratorium on adoption is in effect in the state, and its cross-border aspect is suspended altogether.

Deported Ukrainian children unaccompanied by a legal representative, for example, due to the fact that their parents were killed or detained by Russians, must have at least a guardian – an adult citizen of Russia. After such children are placed in orphanages on the territory of the aggressor state, they are prepared for transfer to Russian families. For this purpose, deported children are included in the single federal database of orphans and children deprived of parental care.

Since such children are registered with local guardianship bodies, they are also included in this database as other Russian children from the respective region. This not only violates the rights of such children, but also makes their identification much more difficult.

Having analyzed the profile of Ukrainian children whom the Russians placed under their care, it can be argued that there was a special intention to place them in Russian families, and not children of the same age from Russia itself. As Lvova-Belova claims, these are teenagers, children with disabilities and large family groups. At the same time, 85% of Russian children in orphanages, representatives of these categories, still remain without a chance to find a family.

It should not be forgotten that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in Russia, a separate register of families that were ready to adopt Ukrainian children was kept. In addition, according to the testimony of the governor of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, Dmitriy Artyukhov, “Russian mothers and fathers were not frightened by the distance, nor by the big questions with the documents of some children.”

Individual families openly state that they do not fully know about the presence or absence of blood relatives in a child. In a similar situation with a Russian orphan, neither guardianship nor adoption would be possible, because the collection of the necessary documents is a preliminary mandatory stage before the actual transfer.

It was at this stage that one of the residents of Novosibirsk gave up on a local boy and adopted 2 children from the Luhansk region into her family.

Appropriation of Ukrainian children is a state policy of Russia

In one of her last interviews, Lvova-Belova noted that there are no Ukrainian children in Russia, only Russian ones. This does not correspond to reality and once again testifies in favor of a special intention to recruit deported minors. But what is the purpose?

Sergey Mironov, who adopted the Ukrainian girl Margarita Prokopenko, explains why such a policy is necessary on the same wavelength as the President of Russia: “We have such problems with demography now.” It was on the initiative of Mironov, voiced at the meeting with Putin, that 2024 was declared in Russia “the year of the large family.” It is this deputy of the “non-pro-government” party who insists on extending the presidential term of the Russian dictator.

Myronov’s party took an active part in the development of acts of Russian legislation regarding the imposition of Russian citizenship on deported minors, and also initiated the law on renunciation of Ukrainian citizenship. In addition, Mironov also supports the former commissioner for children’s rights, Anna Kuznetsova, in her efforts to simplify the transfer of Ukrainian children to Russian families as much as possible by canceling a number of requirements.

Illegal adoption through the lens of international law

Changing the status of a child from the occupied territory, including its adoption by Russian citizens, violates Article 50 of the Geneva Convention on the Protection of the Civilian Population in Time of War. Together with illegal export, this is also a violation of Article 49 of the same treaty. Adoption can be interpreted as aimed at unjustifiably delaying repatriation, as a separate war crime, and as a completed act of genocide under Article 6(e) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The case of Margarita Prokopenko is an illustrative manifestation of this very crime:

change of personal data;

forced transfer to a Russian family;

inability to preserve Ukrainian identity;

the presence of blood relatives in Ukraine.

Unlike crimes against humanity, in order to qualify as genocide, it is enough to commit it against 1 person.

On July 1, 2022, based on the UNHCR’s policy on the adoption of refugee children, the NGO “Better care network” called for a moratorium on interstate adoption as a response to the conflict in Ukraine. The Hague Conference on Private International Law reiterated its position on the need to focus attention on the protection of children in armed conflicts and the inadmissibility of adoption in such circumstances.

On January 27, 2023, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Filippo Grandi, emphasized that “granting children Russian citizenship or their adoption contradicts the fundamental principles of protecting children during war.”

Unpunished for 9 years, evil is growing in scale. The Crimean orphans deported and adopted by the Russians before the start of the full-scale invasion were not even mentioned in the ISS reports. This became a green light for the continuation of the policy of violent appropriation of Ukrainian children by the Russians. The arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova also do not contain any mention of genocide.

So how many more children need to be adopted to make the international community’s response more decisive?