The Russian Federation transferred 42 children from the Kherson Children’s Home to foster families in Crimea

The occupation authorities of the Kherson region transferred 42 children from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home, who were illegally taken out of Kherson in 2022, to foster families in the occupied Crimea.

According to the occupation senator from the Kherson region, Konstantin Basyuk, almost all of the children were illegally placed with families on the peninsula. According to him, five children are still in the Crimean Republican Specialized Children’s Home “Yolochka”. Some of the children have serious developmental disabilities, including cerebral palsy and autism.

Basyuk reported that in 2022, 47 children from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home were brought to “Yolochka”. Currently, according to him, 42 children have been transferred to foster families of Crimeans, and five remain in the institution.

Information about this appeared in the Russian media after Basyuk published a post “congratulating” the kidnapped children on the New Year holidays.

The story of the abduction of children from Kherson gained wide publicity. In 2024, major international publications, including The New York Times, wrote about it. At the same time, the fate of most of the children remained unknown for a long time.

At the time of the start of the full-scale invasion, there were children under the age of five in the Kherson regional children’s home. Some of them had serious health problems. They were not orphans – some had parents with limited parental rights.

In the fall of 2022, before retreating from the right-bank part of the Kherson region, the Russian military took 46 or 47 children from the orphanage out of Kherson. The children were taken to occupied Simferopol.

Later, the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, stated that the children would be placed in Russian foster families only if their biological parents were not found in Ukraine. At the same time, the Russian side granted the Ukrainian children Russian citizenship and reissued their documents, which is a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and is considered a war crime.

As of October 2024, about 1.6 million children aged 0 to 18 lived in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. By the end of March 2025, 451 children, as well as 18 orphans and children deprived of parental care, had been returned to the territory controlled by Ukraine.

Director of the Bring Kids Back UA initiative Dariya Zarivna said that representatives of the Russian Federation are sending abducted children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to “re-education camps” and forbidding them to speak Ukrainian. They also seek to form a mobilization potential for the Russian army.

The British news agency Reuters reported that Russia has classified data on children whom the occupation authorities illegally took from the Kherson region to Crimea or the Russian Federation. Journalists found 17 children from an orphanage in Kherson on Russian adoption websites. The names and ages of some children have been changed on the website. Thus, the new Russian name and age of one child differ from her Ukrainian state documents. Another child’s Ukrainian name was replaced with its Russian version. There is no mention of the Ukrainian origin of any of them.

In a comment to Vgor, human rights activist Pavlo Lysyansky said that the main ideologist of the deportation of Ukrainian children was the vice-speaker of the Russian State Duma Anna Kuznetsova. It was she who lobbied the idea of ​​deporting children to Putin. But when an arrest warrant was issued for him, she proposed a solution to this problem: to create a parliamentary commission that would accuse him of crimes against the children of Ukraine.