Three more Ukrainian children have been returned from the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and from Russia with the mediation of Qatar, Ukrainian presidential chief-of-staff Andrii Yermak reported on Telegram on Dec. 16.
Two of the children, born in 2008 and 2012, were evacuated from the occupied territories and reunited with their mother. The third child, who was in Russia, was reunited with their mother in Georgia.
Many of the abducted children were either orphans or lacked proper guardianship, having lost parental care. Entire orphanages and facilities housing such vulnerable children were forcibly relocated en masse to Russia, as occurred with one of the children, Bohdan Yermokhin, who eventually left Russia.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe reported on Nov. 27 that it had set up a special committee on the violation of the rights of Ukrainian children by Russians.
Read also: Five more Ukrainian kids abducted by Russia are returned to Ukraine
The first meeting of the committee was held in Paris on Dec. 15, focusing on violations of children’s rights by Russia, as well as the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted on April 27 a resolution recognizing the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia as genocide.
According to the Ukrainian state platform Children of War, as of Sept. 27, at least 19,546 children have been deported or forcibly transferred by Russia.
In total, according to the European Parliament, the number of Ukrainian children illegally abducted to Russia may be as high as 300,000. MEPs believe that Russians started taking Ukrainian children back in 2014, after the occupation of Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
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