More than 6,000 Ukrainian children have been detained in at least 43 camps and other facilities in Russia since the start of the war, a study by the Yale University Institute for Human Rights Research finds. “The report documents the systematic relocation, re-education and, in some cases, fostering or adoption of Ukrainian children by Russia,” reports the Yale School of Public Health on its Twitter account.
These children are “aged from 4 months to 17 years”, and their total number is “probably significantly more than 6,000”, the report says. But those on whom the British researchers were able to collect information were mostly deported to “pre-existing summer camps”: 12 grouped around the Black Sea, 7 in occupied Crimea and 10 near the cities of Moscow, Kazan and Yekaterinburg. In addition, the researchers identified “two camps in Siberia and one in the far east of Russia”, as well as a psychiatric hospital involved in the deportation of orphans.
Dozens of government figures involved
“All levels of the Russian government are involved,” says the report, which speaks of a “centralised, coordinated operation”. Several “dozens of federal, regional and local figures” have been identified by the researchers, involved in “logistical coordination, collection of funds and supplies, camp management”. Among them, “at least 12 individuals are not on the Western sanctions list”.
In these camps, at least 32 are “engaged in a systematic re-education effort that exposes Ukrainian children to Russian academic, cultural, patriotic and/or military education”. In addition, at least twenty “allegedly orphaned” children from two camps were “placed with families in the Moscow region and enrolled in local schools”.