Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine: during the war, at least 460 children were killed, 919 were injured

Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, 460 children have died, 919 minors have been injured of varying severity. This was reported by the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.

The department clarified that this is only the data that was verified during the war. The real numbers may be higher.

The prosecutor’s office also reports that during the war, due to shelling and bombing, 3,126 children’s and educational institutions were damaged, 337 of them were completely destroyed. More than 16 thousand children were taken to Russia.

These data are close to UN statistics, according to which, since February 2022, about 1,100 Ukrainian children have been killed and injured. More than a million children have fled their homes and taken refuge inside the country.

In total, 7.7 million people left Ukraine and became refugees, most of them women and children.

UNICEF – the United Nations Children’s Fund – said that in 2023, more than a billion dollars will need to be allocated to meet the needs of Ukrainian children both inside and outside the country. Of these, $829 million is needed to support children in Ukraine itself and $229 million for refugee children abroad. This amount includes the cost of education, food, accommodation and medical care.

The Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they do not strike civilian targets and residential areas in Ukraine. The movement of Ukrainian citizens, including children, to the territory of Russia they qualify as voluntary refugee.

Ukraine has returned two more children who were illegally deported from Luhansk region to Russia.

This is reported by the Ministry of Reintegration.

It is reported that two sisters, 13 and 15 years old, together with their mother, were deported from Luhansk region to Ryazan. In Russia, the mother died, and the children ended up in an orphanage.

Their older sister, who managed to evacuate with her family to the Volyn region, appealed to the Ministry of Reintegration. All of them went through the process from the formalization of guardianship over the girls to their return to Ukraine.

Now the girls are completely safe.

Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets reported that Russia did not agree to provide a list of children who were taken out of Ukraine and who do not want to stay in the Russian Federation.

As of February 4, it is possible to drive to the village of Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region from the Mykolaiv region only along burned and shot civilian cars.

Russian soldiers opened fire on people who tried to help relatives and friends in the occupied territories. The number of dead remains unknown.

About what happened near the village during the occupation, Nataliya Kamenetska, the head of the Oleksandrivka village of the Stanislavsk community, told.

According to Natalia, there are two roads from Oleksandrivka to Mykolaiv. One through Kherson, the other through the dam that separates Lake Solonets from the Dnieper estuary.

“The locals knew about her, but in general she was little known. The road was not in very good condition, so there was almost no transit on it,” said the head of Oleksandrivka.

After the capture of Kherson, according to Natalia Kamenetska, many people left through the dam. It was even called “the road of life.” But it did not last long. A month after the start of the full-scale invasion, Russian forces began shelling the dam.

“From March 28 to April, the Russian military shot not only the equipment of Ukrainian soldiers, but also civilian transport,” Natalia said.

At the end of March 2022, active fighting took place around Oleksandrivka. The Russian military blocked the entrance to the village from the Kherson side.

“Civilians and volunteers tried to get to Oleksandrivka through the dam. Some went to pick up their relatives, some brought humanitarian aid. It was the cars of these people who were shot on this dam. How many people died there is still unknown (as of February 4),” Kamenetska said.

The Russians did not allow, says the old man, even to approach the dam. There was no question of taking away the bodies of the dead. The rest could be taken away only after de-occupation in November 2022.

“The car that left the embankment on March 28 and reached Robochoi Street was shot from a tank. The car remained in the middle of the road, thus creating a traffic jam. The following cars were also shot,” Natalia said.

According to Kamenetska, this happened for about a week. On April 3-4, fighters of the 28th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to enter Oleksandrivka, but even before the dam they opened fire on them.

“Since the beginning of April, we have warned everyone that the road is closed – it is impossible to leave or enter. However, on May 7, volunteers tried to enter the village. Their car was also shot. The guys from their team reported that three managed to get out of the overturned car, and one was injured. We were asked to help him, but…”, Kamenetska said.

According to the official, the last case known to her, when the occupiers shot a civilian car on the dam, happened in the summer.

“A taxi driver from Mykolaiv tried to take a foreign journalist to the village in his own car. They were also shot on that dam.”

According to the head of the village, 21 civilians were killed during the hostilities in Oleksandrivka. Among them, several people were shot by the Russian military. Another four are considered missing.

What actions does Russia take with regard to children in the Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army? How does this resemble the actions of Hitler’s Nazis during World War II? Why is the illegal removal of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia, followed by their Russification, a war crime?

Is it possible to hold Russia accountable? Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), gave an exclusive interview about this.

• At the end of January, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, stated that Russia was violating fundamental principles of child protection during wartime by issuing Russian passports to Ukrainian children and giving them up for adoption to Russian families. We are talking about children who were taken from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia. Most often, this happened against the will of the children.
• Critics of the Kremlin’s actions compare the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia with the “Germanization” that Hitler’s Nazis subjected children from occupied Eastern and Central Europe to. It is still not possible to establish the exact number of children deported by the Nazis from Ukraine during the Second World War. Researchers name numbers from three to 50 thousand from the territory of the USSR. The Nazis selected “racially pure” children, reeducated them in special centers and sent them to German families for adoption. Most of those children kidnapped by the aggressor country never found out what happened to them.
• Daria Gerasymchuk, the Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights and Child Rehabilitation, stated in January that her department “managed to identify and verify the data of 13,899 children who were abducted and deported by the Russian army.” The Children’s Ombudsman of Ukraine said that only 125 of them managed to return home.

– The international community is looking for ways to hold Russia accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. What can be done within the framework of the OSCE for this? And are there effective options?

– Yes, work on establishing responsibility is a critically important basis of OSCE activity.

We, the OSCE, were actually the first international organization to send a fact-finding team to Ukraine, and the first to establish and announce that war crimes in Ukraine were actually committed by the Russian Federation.

The OSCE was the first international organization to establish that war crimes in Ukraine were actually committed by the Russian Federation

These crimes were documented and this evidence was given to various other organizations to establish accountability.

We did it again, using the so-called “Moscow mechanism” and sending a second fact-finding team, which also established the facts of the alleged crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine.

So, we have done quite a lot of work. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has continued since the beginning of the war to document and preserve evidence of war crimes and other crimes or should I say violations of international human rights law. All of them are stored and sent to the International Criminal Court, the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine and other authorities, which will later investigate these crimes.

I think it’s no secret that now the UN Commission of Inquiry is the main mechanism that drives the prosecution process.

More than sixty thousand war crimes have been established

The General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine will most likely be the body that will prosecute the vast majority of these cases.

More than sixty thousand war crimes have been established so far. The international criminal court will obviously be looking at a fraction of that number, but probably only a small fraction. And then we will have to see if there will be a decision by the international community to establish some special tribunal.

– There is a specific question about one specific crime. UN experts have published fresh evidence that Russia is abducting Ukrainian children from the territory of Ukraine and carrying out their Russification. What can the international community and the OSCE do to stop this crime?

– This is one of the most despicable and barbaric crimes among many different crimes that Russia commits in Ukraine. And we are determined to help document cases of children who have been separated from their families, illegally or forcibly deported across the border to Russia.

This, in my opinion, is another example of Russia’s desire to erase Ukrainian sovereignty from the earth, getting rid of all traces of Ukrainian national identity.

This is one of the most heinous and barbaric crimes of the many different crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine

We in the OSCE have just created a new program to support Ukraine, which is based inside that country, because, as you remember, Russia vetoed the previous field mission. So we had to figure out a way to create a mission that Russia couldn’t veto, and we’ve done that now. And that will be one of the priorities for this mission, and for the OSCE in general, to figure out how we can help the Ukrainian authorities develop some kind of process to register all these illegal deportations so that these children can eventually be reunited with their families.

– You just mentioned the Russian veto. But Russia actually violated all the main OSCE documents signed by Moscow in the 1970s and 1990s. Shouldn’t Russia be simply excluded from the OSCE at least until it stops its aggression against Ukraine and withdraws its troops from all Ukrainian territory?

– I certainly sympathize with such a position, and God is witness that everything that Russia has done during these last 11 months already definitely deserves much tougher actions than just expulsion from the OSCE.

Belarus, also a member of the OSCE, helps Russia and promotes its war of aggression

However, as you pointed out, the organization was created in the early 1990s, and at that time there was no provision to expel or suspend the membership of any country without the agreement of a majority of the organization’s members. It must be a minus one consensus, that is, the consensus of everyone except the country being excluded.

Unfortunately, we do not have such a consensus because Belarus, also a member of the OSCE, helps Russia and promotes its war of aggression – so the formal mechanism of expelling Russia cannot be engaged.

We managed to isolate Russia and Belarus within the organization

But the tools we have are actually very important, because unlike the Council of Europe, which expelled Russia and therefore no longer has the tools to hold Russia accountable, we don’t have the tools to expel Russia — but we’ve managed to isolate Russia and Belarus within the organization.

And if you look at the results of the meeting of the Council of Ministers of the OSCE last December, you will see that the OSCE unanimously condemned Russia and Belarus. That is why we have successfully isolated these two countries and will continue to do so.

This has some advantages in terms of sending diplomatic signals condemning their actions almost every week. And at the end of the day, I think everyone believes that what Russia has done is not just a violation of some OSCE rules or procedures, but essentially a destruction of all the core commitments on which the OSCE is based.

– If we continue the topic of international organizations, Russia also uses the UN Security Council to block any attempts to hold it accountable for aggression against Ukraine. In your opinion, is it possible to deprive Russia of a seat in the UN Security Council for all those crimes against world order and security that were committed by its leadership?

– I am not an expert on the problems of the United Nations, as I am the ambassador to the OSCE, but, as here, it is just as difficult to imagine a mechanism in the UN that would allow Russia to be excluded from the Security Council.

However, that doesn’t mean we can’t get creative and work together with like-minded people to hold Russia accountable. As I mentioned, there are different ideas about tribunals, and the ICC is, of course, actively involved in war crimes cases.

There are other ways to hold Russia accountable. We can potentially consider the issue of payment of reparations by Russia for all damages caused by it.

There are other methods of using international organizations and the international system to hold Russia accountable than simply excluding Russia from all the various bodies in which it participates.

And I will just give you the example of the OSCE, because I know it better: sometimes it is very useful to have the opportunity to interact in our organization with countries and regions such as Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Moldova, the Western Balkans, which are actively involved in our efforts with regard to Russia, than simply liquidating the organization and working with NATO and the EU – of course, they have their own tasks, which are very important, but it is useful to work with other countries on the periphery of Russia.

And if you were to get rid of Russia in the OSCE, then potentially the entire organization could cease to exist, and that would be very bad. So we, the diplomats, just need to be creative about what new mechanisms we can use to hold Russia accountable and support Ukraine. So far, I think we’re doing pretty well with it.

Genocide and its signs in Russia’s actions against Ukraine

During the large-scale war, Russia commits all kinds of crimes against the citizens of Ukraine that can fall under the definition of genocide, according to lawyers, genocide researchers and human rights defenders:

• announcement of intentions to destroy Ukrainians: the president of Russia and representatives of the Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that Ukrainians as an ethnic group “does not exist”, that it is an “artificially created” nation, and those who do not think so “must be destroyed”, and Ukraine and Ukrainians must not exist in the future;
• public calls for the extermination of Ukrainians;
• targeted attacks on the life support systems of the population and health care institutions of Ukraine with the aim of depriving people of electricity, water supply, communication, medical care and other means of living;
• persecution and extermination of people with a pro-Ukrainian position in the occupied territories;
• extermination of the intelligentsia: teachers, artists, people who are carriers of Ukrainian culture and educate others in it;
• introduction in educational institutions in the occupied territories of a system of education and upbringing aimed at changing the identity of children;
• deportation of children without parents to Russia in order to change their identity;
• removal and destruction of Ukrainian books from libraries, looting of museums and purposeful theft of artifacts indicating the ancient history of Ukrainians.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

The member countries of the Convention, of which there are currently 149, must prevent acts of genocide and punish them during wartime and in peacetime.

The Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, religious, ethnic group as such.

Signs of genocide: killing group members or inflicting serious bodily harm on them; deliberate creation of living conditions designed to destroy the group; prevention of childbirth and forced transfer of children from one group to another; public incitement to commit such actions.