Ukraine just charged a Russian politician with war crimes for allegedly deporting children from their Ukrainian homes – and their whereabouts are still unknown.
According to Ukraine, more than 19,000 children have been illegally moved to Russia or Russian-occupied territory since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of its in February last year.
Reuters news agency reports that these new prosecution documents officially charge one Russian politician and two suspected Ukrainian collaborators – although their names have been redacted from the papers.
The prosecutor alleges 48 children were forced from a children’s home in Kherson, one of the four regions Putin illegally annexed last year, in September and October.
These children were supposedly taken to Moscow and the occupied peninsula of Crimea. They’re said to be between one and four years in age.
The charges – the first to be issued in this case – were filed in Ukraine on Friday during a pre-trial stage when prosecutors determine there is enough evidence to suspect someone of committing a crime.
If the charges can be proven, this is a violation of laws and customs of war under the 1949 Geneva Convention, and could result in up to 12 years in prison according to Ukrainian law.
Most of the orphans were taken on October 21, 2022, under the supervision of the Russian suspect, and then loaded onto white Russian military of health vehicles and taken to Crimea, according to the charges.
Sky News’ international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn suggested that abducting such children could help Russian propaganda and train them to be in the Russian military.
Head of child protection in the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, Yulia Usenko, said: “It was not a one-day event. Forty-eight children who were in the Kherson Region Children’s Home were forcibly displaced, deported.
“We don’t know how these children are, in what conditions they are kept in, or what their fate is.
“They may have been illegally adopted by Russian citizens or taken into Russian institutions.”
This is just the beginning, according to Usenko, adding: “We want to hold accountable all the war criminals, all the people that committed international crimes against our Ukrainian children.”
The suspects’ names are redacted in the official documents, but the trial can go ahead without them as they may be in Russia or Crimea.
Prosecutors had a video reportedly showing a suspect putting the children on a bus which had the pro-Russia ‘Z’ symbol on it.
Responding to these charges, Russia denied violating children’s rights, and said they were only being rescued from conflict areas.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Russia’s children’s right commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova back in March over claims of child deportation.
The warrant was only made public in the hope that it might prevent “the further commission of crimes”.
At the time, the Kremlin said the warrants were “outrageous and unacceptable”, as well as “null and void”.
The UK’s Ministry of Defence suggested earlier in June that Russia is now trying to use children’s rights and “lawfare” to tackle the warrant.
The Russia Duma (the legislative authority), voted to create a parliamentary committee “to investigate alleged crimes committed by the Ukrainian government against juveniles in the Donbas since 2014.”
The Donbas is the eastern region of Ukraine which Russia is trying to occupy completely.