Taken As Children to Grow Up as Russians: Will the War Be Truly Over If They Are Still Missing?

Since 2022, Russia has forcibly deported or transferred some 20 000 Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied territories (TOT), with the real numbers feared to exceed the official count. Slightly over 2 100 of them have come home.

Beyond that, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights estimates that more than 1.6 mn Ukrainian children currently reside in TOT. They are growing in an environment of indoctrination, systemic coercion, and indiscriminate violence—under conditions not much different from deportation, albeit with parents.[1]

Many children were abducted from orphanages or boarding schools in the chaos of the early weeks of the full-scale invasion. Some were orphaned by Russia; others have no immediate family left to search for them.[2]

Eighteen Countries, Forty Investigators, Two Days, and Forty-Five Children

In mid-April in The Hague, Europol hosted a two-day hackathon that brought forty investigators from eighteen countries, including the United States, alongside the International Criminal Court (ICC) and private parties to its headquarters. Using only publicly available digital tools—open-source intelligence (OSINT), such as social media and official databases—they identified potential locations of 45 Ukrainian children. Some had already been placed with adoptive Russian families, others in so-called ‘re-education camps’. More disturbingly, however, several were traced to Russian psychiatric hospitals. In light of the Soviet legacy of ‘punitive psychiatry’, and specifically its resurgent trends in modern Russia, far darker details will likely surface from this investigative avenue. The evidence collected at this stage—transportation routes, individuals who enabled deportations and received the deportees, military units assigned, etc.—was handed over to Ukraine.

The numbers might be modest, but the human impact will be huge. This data should now assist Kyiv’s search-and-rescue efforts. Very few reunifications, however, are conducted via (semi)official diplomatic channels: 83 with Qatari mediation, and 26 through a scheme led by First Lady Melania Trump. The rest came back the way Mykola Kuleba, Ukraine’s former children’s ombudsman and the founder of Save Ukraine NGO, calls “an underground railroad.”

Of such was Rostyslav Lavrov, now a 19-year-old living in Kyiv, but a minor when Russian forces took his hometown in Kherson Oblast and sent him to a naval academy in occupied Crimea. The school tried to issue him a new, Russian birth certificate. Volunteers from Save Ukraine helped the boy with his secret plan to escape. The journey to Ukraine took days and multiple Russian checkpoints. Only later, Rostyslav learned that the Russian authorities had declared him ‘missing’ and ‘wanted’.

Ukraine’s Special Rescue Operations Forces

Once desk research is complete, the work on—or under—the ground begins, the work that Ukrainian volunteers describe as “a special operation for every child.”

Save Ukraine is careful to avoid contact with ‘occupants’: “We don’t work with the Russian authorities or any officials in occupied territories, because it’s really dangerous.” Once Moscow learns that Kyiv is looking for a specific child, it will do anything to prevent that child’s return. Yet, absent a formal mechanism (as the Kremlin continues to deny the scope and scale, as well as the fact of deportations), volunteers “have to do it unofficially.” “We built an underground railroad to find and rescue these kids,” Save Ukraine says.

Their methods, however, overlap with Europol’s. Save Ukraine’s 30-person team uses OSINT, such as social-media campaigns on YouTube and TikTok, and interviews with returnees about other children from Ukraine they have encountered while in Russia. They have even tried to reach the abducted children inside online video games. As of early May, Save Ukraine had reportedly brought close to 1 300 children home.

The Ukrainian Child Rights Network, run by Darya Kasyanova, has repatriated nearly 340 minors. For her team, too, each mission is a delicate balance between the child’s safe return and the safety of volunteers assisting it; travelling into TOT or Russia has become too dangerous even for the parents themselves.

Both Kuleba and Kasyanova agree that international child protection requirements—such as interviewing each child and formally establishing their best interests before repatriation—are “unworkable” in the context of Russia’s ongoing war. The children are too traumatised and often abused, including sexually. The Russian authorities are anything but willing and cooperative. And delays endanger everyone involved in operations.

Four years is a long time, especially for younger children. As time passes, searching becomes more complicated, while children grow up with minds shaped by Russian propaganda, and with fading or no memory of Ukraine before the full-scale invasion.

Cannot Be Excused

In March, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine confirmed what independent investigators, the ICC, and the Ukrainian government and NGOs had argued since 2022: that Russia’s deportation and forcible transfer, as well as enforced disappearance and failure to return, of Ukrainian children amount to crimes against humanity. The Commission traced children flown on Russia’s presidential aircraft, dispersed across 21 regions (as far north as the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District and as far east as Novosibirsk Oblast), and issued forged birth certificates and new Russian documents to enable placement in adoption databases and with foster families. Of the UN-documented cases, eight in ten children have not come home as Russia has systemically sought to conceal their whereabouts.

Taken together, these actions have nothing to do with improvised evacuation—they constitute premeditated and criminal state policy. And under international law, crimes against humanity cannot be excused by amnesty. Nor do they have a statute of limitations (something that last year’s 29-point peace plan at least entertained).

Earlier, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the immediate, safe, and unconditional return of Ukrainian children, as well as ceasing the unlawful practices of forcible transfer and family separation, changes of citizenship, adoption, and indoctrination. (91 countries voted in favour of the initiative; 12 backed Russia, and 57 abstained).

Around the same time, the US Congress held a bicameral hearing on “The Abduction of Ukrainian Children by the Russian Federation.” A bipartisan group of senators tabled a bill to designate Russia “as a state sponsor of terrorism” unless it returned the Ukrainian children. Under its provisions, the State Department would have to submit a report to Congress certifying that Moscow had complied. Otherwise, Russia would join the “exclusive pariah club” of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran with devastating consequences for its economy, according to Sen Lindsey Graham. He further called on “every European parliament” to follow suit to “work together to put maximum pressure on Putin’s Russia.”

The US position, however, has been rather inconsistent. In March, the State Department’s $25 mn programme restored funding it had itself withdrawn a year earlier—specifically to “support the identification, return, and rehabilitation of Ukrainian children and youth who have been forcibly transferred or otherwise held away from their families and communities.” The press release did not name Russia as the culprit.

Ukraine has insisted that any peace settlement must include a provision guaranteeing the return of all civilian prisoners, including children. And perpetrators must be brought to justice—this includes Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, both under ICC arrest warrants for the very crime of unlawful deportations of Ukrainian children.

Estonia, alongside some twenty nations, has joined the Management Committee of the Special Tribunal that will eventually prosecute the underlying crime of aggression. The US has not. The Riigikogu was also the first parliament to formally approve the Council of Europe (CoE) agreement, lending its administrative and financial weight to the tribunal. The CoE will convene in Chișinău in May to take the next step toward concluding the agreement and launching the Special Tribunal.

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At that Congressional hearing, Sen Graham asked a question that puts everything into perspective: “How can you end this war unless every child is accounted for?”

The Europol hackathon has shown that it might be possible to account for many more of the missing children. Hopefully, most, but unfortunately, not all. We have to reconcile ourselves with the fact that some will grow up in Russia, without ever finding out who they are and where they came from.

Yet many are still traceable, and a coordinated international coalition can find them much faster than Ukrainian NGOs, running on goodwill and insufficient funding, can alone. If a team of 40 well-equipped investigators can identify and locate 45 in two days, how much more can be done?

This commentary was first published in Postimees.

[1] McGlynn J, Romaniuk A, “Capturing the Minds: The Role of Child Deportation in Maintaining Russian Authority over Ukraine’s Occupied Territories,” European Journal of International Security (Cambridge University Press, March 2026), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-international-security/article/capturing-the-minds-the-role-of-child-deportation-in-maintaining-russian-authority-over-ukraines-occupied-territories/752354B4F5AB0983F4CE5A489FA10391. For more on conditions, see: “UN Urges Halt to Attacks on Civilians and Renewed Push for Diplomacy in Ukraine,” United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, 9 December 2025, https://dppa.un.org/en/speeches-and-statements/un-urges-halt-attacks-civilians-and-renewed-push-diplomacy-ukraine; “More Than a Third of Ukraine’s Children Remain Displaced Four Years into War – UNICEF,” UNICEF, 17 February 2026, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-third-ukraines-children-remain-displaced-four-years-war-unicef.

[2] The Russian authorities only permit the immediate family (parents, grandparents, siblings) to travel inside Russia and apply for reunification, severely complicating repatriation for the children whose relatives serve in the defence forces. “Львова-Белова заявила, что в списке Киева большинство подлежащих возвращению детей уже взрослые,” Interfax, 24 July 2025, https://www.interfax.ru/russia/1037901.For more, see also: British Embassy Kyiv, “Deportation of Ukrainian children by Russia: joint statement,” UK Government, 1 June 2023. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-on-deportation-of-ukrainian-children-by-russia