Eyewitnesses to a war crime Ukraine’s 20,000 stolen children are on the Trump administration’s radar. But will it help get them back?
More than two weeks have passed since U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and by all appearances, this controversial show of diplomacy yielded no tangible results. Despite the positive follow-up meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders, the Trump administration’s initial claims that Putin had agreed to make concessions quickly proved false. In the days that followed, Moscow deployed Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to reiterate its long-held demands, and the Russian military continued its offensive in Donbas and devastating attacks on Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, an issue that appeared to be top of mind during the summits on U.S. soil — the return of the 20,000 Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia — risks fading into the background once again.
When Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska last month, he brought the Russian president a letter from the U.S. first lady. Citing its sources, Reuters reported that the letter carried a message about the plight of children — specifically those abducted during Russia’s war against Ukraine. And while it turns out this wasn’t exactly true, Melania Trump’s letter succeeded in raising this issue on the international stage.
“The first lady felt very strongly,” Trump told reporters days later, during a subsequent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. “She loves children, and she hates to see something like this happening,” he explained. “It was a beautiful letter — it was very well received by him [Putin], and she did ask me to say she would love to see this end.”
The letter, which Trump eventually posted online in full, did not directly mention Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, or its forcible deportation of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. Nevertheless, Zelensky seized the opportunity to connect Melania’s plea to this very issue — and to curry favor with Trump himself. Expressing his gratitude to the U.S. first lady for her letter to Putin “about our abducted children,” Zelensky handed Trump another letter written by Ukraine’s own first lady, Olena Zelenska.
“It’s not to you, it’s to your wife,” Zelensky explained with a laugh, before growing serious once again. “It’s a sensitive topic,” he added.
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Behind closed doors, Zelensky’s delegation also showed Trump a photo and birth certificate of a Ukrainian toddler who had been taken to Russia, given a new name and birthplace, and “adopted” by a Kremlin-linked official, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Ukraine has repeatedly said that the return of stolen children must be part of any peace agreement with Russia. However, getting this issue on the Trump administration’s radar required a months-long lobbying campaign by Ukrainian and European officials, and evangelical Christian groups, according to the WSJ.
Talking to reporters outside the White House after meeting with Trump and European leaders on August 19, Zelensky seemed confident that the message had gotten through. “Both the First Lady and the U.S. team understand that they will be involved in such an important, painful, and very complex issue as bringing Ukrainian children back,” he assured.
‘The largest kidnapping case since World War II’
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for war crimes, accusing them of overseeing the illegal deportations of children from Ukraine’s occupied territories to Russia.
Ukrainian officials say they have verified Russia’s deportation of nearly 20,000 children from occupied regions. A team of experts at Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) places the number even higher, estimating that as many as 35,000 Ukrainian children have been taken to locations in Russia and the occupied territories.
Nathaniel Raymond, the Yale HRL’s executive director, describes these forced transfers as “the largest kidnapping case since World War II.”
The Yale HRL’s estimate includes children who were at recreational camps when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as children living in care homes and other state-run institutions in regions that came under occupation. Others were swept up after their parents were killed in the hostilities, or separated from their families while undergoing “filtration” — a process Russian forces use to register, interrogate, and detain prisoners of war and civilians alike.
“The Russian state has also made many of these children orphans,” says Kristina Hook, an atrocity prevention expert and assistant professor at Kennesaw State University.
Experts say they have the least information about those children who were separated from their families during filtration. “They are the only ones we know were directly separated from their parents, [ripped] from their arms, because they were brought through the filtration camps as families and they were held by the Russians when their parents were taken for interrogation,” Raymond explains.
“One of the reasons that we don’t have a lot of documentation about this is because, to the best of our knowledge, what tends to happen is that even when children are returned, the parents are not returned with them,” says Hook.
Only 1,592 children have returned to Ukraine so far, according to Bring Kids Back UA, a humanitarian program President Zelensky initiated in 2023. In May 2024, the Ukrainian government established a national mechanism to identify, return, and reintegrate forcibly displaced and deported children.
When asked about how abducted children generally return to Ukraine, Hook says: “It’s important not to talk about the specifics here.” She continues:
Under international law, these children have a right to return [to Ukraine]. And the situation is that at every stage, the Russian state works hard to prevent their return — to the extent that those of us that work on this issue and that know some of these methods have to be very careful with talking about it publicly so that they’re not closed down by the Russian state.
‘We negotiate through other countries’
While Russia and Ukraine have brokered exchanges of POWs and war dead throughout the full-scale invasion, efforts to negotiate the repatriation of Ukrainian children have yielded precious few results. However, Qatar has reportedly managed to mediate the return of dozens since July 2023.
In August, Lvova-Belova’s office claimed that since 2022, she had facilitated the reunification of 26 children from 18 families with relatives in Russia, as well as 115 children from 91 families who were returned to their relatives in Ukraine and other countries.
“We cannot reach an agreement with [Russia] on the return of the children,” Zelensky told journalists last month. “We negotiate through other countries that carry out mediation missions. The most successful have been the Qataris. So far, they’ve been helping us.”
Civil society groups like Save Ukraine have also assisted family members in their attempts to retrieve children from reeducation camps or temporary accommodation facilities in Russia and the occupied territories. In a few cases, older children have managed to escape and return to Ukraine.
“By taking these children, [Russia has] literally put them in a situation where they have no recourse, nobody to advocate for them, and [they’ve] also put them in a context that is extremely dehumanizing against Ukrainians,” Hook says. “That is a situation rife for child exploitation and abuse.”
Russian officials continue to defend the deportation of children from Ukraine’s occupied territories as a humanitarian measure. Just months after her indictment by the ICC, in July 2023, Maria Lvova-Belova wrote in a report that Russia had “taken in” some 700,000 Ukrainian children.
In the same report, Lvova-Belova maintained that some parents in Ukraine’s frontline regions had “voluntarily sent their children on vacation” to health resorts and recreational facilities in Crimea and Russia’s Krasnodar region.
“Russian authorities often use this language that the parents ‘offered their children to us’ or something like that. They really try to downplay the word we [human rights experts] use, which is ‘forcible,’” Hook explains. “When you’re talking about deportation or movement by a warring party, the law would often interpret this as forcible because the children are moved for their own safety.”
According to the U.K. government, which on September 3, imposed new sanctions on leading Russian officials and state-linked organizations for their involvement in the Kremlin’s deportation policy, an estimated 6,000 Ukrainian children are being held in Russia’s network of reeducation camps, where they are subjected to indoctrination and militarization efforts. “Russia’s well-documented militarization of these children — and of its own youth — makes it clear this war isn’t just about territorial claims along its border,” Hook argues. “These abductions and militarization reveal Russia's deeper imperial ambitions that extend beyond Ukraine.”
Russian authorities have also passed a raft of legislation targeting Ukrainian children in Russia and occupied territories, including laws making it possible to confer fast-tracked citizenship on those purported to be orphans or without parental care. Under Russian law, naturalization paves the way for these children to be adopted permanently by families in Russia. But regardless of the Kremlin’s efforts to “legalize” these adoptions domestically, they’re still illegal under international law, Hook says.
In March 2023, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine declared that Russia’s “citizenship and family placement measures” violate the right of Ukrainian children “to preserve [their] identity, including nationality, name, and family relations, without unlawful interference, as recognized by international human rights law.”
‘Openly trafficking Ukrainian children’
The exact number of Ukrainian children who have disappeared into Russia’s adoption and foster care system remains unknown. In February 2024, Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets stated that at least 400 had been formally adopted by Russian families. High-ranking Russian officials, such as Lvova-Belova herself and State Duma lawmaker Sergey Mironov, have themselves “adopted” children taken from Ukraine.
“Institution kids make up the majority, if not the totality of those in the adoption/fostering pipeline,” Raymond says. “Many of these children have severe disabilities, and they are often referred to as ‘orphans.’ Sometimes they do not have living parents, sometimes they do,” he adds, explaining that in Ukraine, these children were wards of the state.
In early August, news that occupation authorities in the Luhansk region had published an adoption database went viral after the co-founder and head of Save Ukraine, former Children’s Rights Commissioner Mykola Kuleba, posted about it online. “Russia isn’t even trying to hide it anymore. It’s openly trafficking Ukrainian children,” he wrote on X.
According to Raymond, Ukrainian minors have been appearing on Russian child placement sites for at least 11 years. “We saw this going back to 2014,” Hook confirms, recalling Russia’s “Trains of Hope” initiative, a program that placed more than 1,000 children from occupied Crimea with families across Russia. “We had seen this trickle of taken children, and what we’re seeing now is this on steroids.”
Last December, the Yale HRL released a report detailing Russia’s systematic program of coerced adoptions and fostering. The findings identified 314 children from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions who had been listed in child placement databases or placed with Russian citizens since 2022. At least 67 of the children had been formally naturalized as Russian citizens. The research team concluded that Russia’s coerced deportation, re-education, and adoption and fostering of children from Ukraine may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Raymond then testified to the U.N. Security Council about the report’s findings. “Russia must provide Ukraine, the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF, and other relevant authorities a full list of the children it has taken, including those in the database systems that we reviewed,” he urged. “Until Russia gives up this information, which it is legally and morally required to do, it will be impossible to fully assess exactly how many children from Ukraine are waiting to go home.”
Russia’s child placement databases have “massive” investigative value for identifying abducted Ukrainian children, Raymond told Meduza. However, researchers must tread carefully when handling and discussing this data, he underscores. “A lot of the attention on these digital artifacts has done damage. It’s alerting the Russians to what’s probative, meaning evidence of a potential crime, and they will remove it or alter data.”
According to Hook, Russian authorities have been known to change Ukrainian children’s names and birthdates to make them harder to trace. “But the deeper changes are, of course, punishing children for speaking their native language or for talking about the history of their country [without] taking on Russian narratives,” she adds.
As Meduza has reported previously, Russian authorities have taken extensive measures to indoctrinate and digitally surveil Ukrainian children living in Russia and under occupation. Most recently, Russia’s Education Ministry announced plans to extend its pro-Kremlin “patriotic” lesson series, Important Conversations, to preschools and kindergartens in occupied areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Luhansk regions.
‘A broader security dilemma’
During talks in Istanbul in June, the Ukrainian delegation gave their Russian counterparts a list of more than 300 abducted children, seeking their return. “This matter is a fundamental priority for us,” Ukraine’s lead negotiator and defense minister, Rustem Umerov, said after the meeting. “If Russia is genuinely committed to a peace process, the return of at least half the children on this list is positive.”
In turn, the Kremlin’s head negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, denied that the children had been abducted by Russia and accused Ukrainian officials of turning the issue into a “shameful show aimed at compassionate Europeans.”
More than two months later, Moscow still has not returned these children, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Mariana Betsa told Euronews. “There is this kind of mocking scorn from the Russian side,” says Hook. “Each of these children is the eyewitness to a war crime. And so I have questions about [whether] that’s one of the reasons why they don’t allow the return of these children.”
As of this writing, there is no mechanism in place for the return of deported Ukrainian children between Russia and Ukraine. And while this issue now appears to be on the Trump administration’s agenda, last month’s flurry of diplomacy has since stalled.
On August 22, Trump gave Russia and Ukraine “two weeks” to move forward with the peace process, reprising a familiar deadline for gauging Putin’s willingness to end the war. “It’s going to be a very important decision, and that’s whether or not it’s massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both,” he said. “Or we do nothing and say, ‘It’s your fight.’” Trump later threatened “economic warfare” if the Kremlin fails to cooperate with Washington’s proposed next step — a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky — but what that might entail remains unclear.
Other U.S. officials have put forward clearer proposals. In late June, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced a congressional resolution calling for the unconditional return of Ukrainian children before a peace deal is signed. More recently, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham promised to push legislation that would designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism if it fails to repatriate Ukraine’s children.
“The United States [is] a key player with real leverage over the Russian government, but has not yet used its leverage to push Russia to return these children,” Hook says. “This is such a big problem that it’s going to require state-level engagement not just by Ukraine but by Ukraine’s partners.”
Zelensky himself has expressed hope that the Trump administration’s interest in the issue will be sustained. “We very much hope that America, the president, and the first lady will continue to make personal efforts to bring back all the children abducted by Russia,” he said in a statement after meeting with U.S. envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv on August 25.
The way Hook sees it, the best approach could be for Washington to make the return of Ukraine’s children one of its “red lines” in its talks with Russia. “These children, their families, and their communities are enduring a horrific and criminal ordeal. But the issue also strikes at the heart of the broader security dilemma that must be addressed for the war to end, including the ongoing push by the U.S. and Europe to define ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine,” she argues.
Despite Moscow showing little interest in negotiating a peace deal, Ukrainian, U.S., and European officials have pushed ahead with talks about postwar security guarantees for Ukraine, including discussions about a potential European peacekeeping force with American backing. Zelensky has insisted that these security guarantees should include funding for Ukraine’s army, defense agreements with NATO member states, and additional sanctions against Russia.
“Any credible U.S. and European security guarantees must convince the Ukrainian public — and its highly capable military — that the West has both the ability and the political will to influence Russian behavior,” Hook says. “If the United States, with all its power and current leverage, cannot compel Russia to return abducted children, it’s hard to see how Ukrainians will trust that Western promises can prevent future aggression or secure lasting peace.”
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Story by Eilish Hart