The Council of Europe’s special envoy on the situation of children in Ukraine denounced this Monday, December 8, that Russia commits “clear war crimes” by kidnapping Ukrainian minors and subjecting them to “Russification” processes to erase their identity.
The accusations by Icelandic Thórdís Gylfadóttir were made at the Doha Forum, in Qatar, on global peace and security.
Speaking to Efe, Thórdís Gylfadóttir stated that “Any normal human being understands how deeply wrong it is to steal other people’s children, take away their identity and forbid them from speaking their own language.”which he classified as “obvious war crimes”.
The official pointed directly to the Russian Federation for simplifying adoption processes and changing the names of deported children, with the aim of forcibly integrating them into their society and eliminating their Ukrainian identity and roots.
The Icelandic diplomat revealed that the Council of Europe has documented cases in which “especially younger boys are being trained to go to the front and fight against their own compatriots, the same people who are sacrificing their lives to fight for the future of these same children”.
According to Gylfadóttir, this “fundamentally wrong” process of Russification includes ideological re-education and the banning of the Ukrainian language, which the International Criminal Court (ICC) classified as war crimes, which is why it issued arrest warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, based on “data and evidence”.
Gylfadóttir’s complaint is part of a systematic pattern of forced deportations that has affected at least 20,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, according to UN data.
The UN General Assembly this week approved a non-binding resolution that demands that Russia immediately return these minors and end practices such as “changing the status” of children, seen by Kiev as “war trophies”.