UN investigators accuse Russia of ‘war crime’ against deported Ukrainian children
Joel Gehrke
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Russia’s forced deportation of Ukrainian children qualifies as “a war crime,” according to United Nations investigators.
“Russian authorities have committed unlawful transfers and deportations of civilians and of other protected persons within Ukraine or to the Russian Federation, respectively,” an independent commission of the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded in a new report. “This is a war crime.”
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Their finding was one of many that emerged from more than 600 interviews conducted across Ukraine, Estonia, and Georgia by a panel of independent investigators. Their assessment adds international credibility to Ukrainian allegations that Russian officials have seized thousands of Ukrainian children — an allegation that could lend itself to a charge of genocide against Russia.
“We have not found that there has been a genocide within Ukraine,” commission chairman Erik Mose, a former Norwegian Supreme Court justice, told reporters Thursday. “We have noted that there are some aspects which may raise questions with respect to that crime … but we have not yet put in any conclusion here.”
The plight of deported Ukrainian children is just one of many war crimes identified by UN investigators, including the execution of civilians and widespread accounts of torture.
“Sexual violence amounting to torture and the threat of such against women and men have been important aspects of the torture exercised by Russian authorities,” the investigators wrote. “Rapes were committed at gunpoint, with extreme brutality and with acts of torture, such as beatings and strangling … In one incident, the victim was pregnant and begged, in vain, the soldiers to spare her; she had a miscarriage a few days later. Perpetrators also, in some instances, executed or tortured husbands and other male relatives. Family members, including children, were sometimes forced to watch perpetrators rape their loved ones.”
The forced relocation of children could prove especially significant for U.S. officials tasked with assessing whether Russia is attempting to commit genocide, as the term is defined in international law.
“The abduction of children is one of the indicia of genocide. It’s one of the ways in which genocide can be committed,” Ambassador Beth Van Schaak, the State Department’s lead official for global criminal justice, told reporters in February. “We often think about genocide as being the equivalent of mass killing, but the treaty itself actually defines other forms of genocide.”
The number of children affected by the resettlement program remains unclear to international investigators. Ukrainian officials say they have identified more than 16,000 specific children deported into Russia, and the investigators note that both governments at various times “have declared that hundreds of thousands of children have been transferred from Ukraine to the Russian Federation” since the beginning of the campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government last year.
“The transfers were not justified by safety or medical reasons,” the UN report states. “There seems to be no indication that it was impossible to allow the children to relocate to territory under Ukrainian Government control. It also does not appear that Russian authorities sought to establish contact with the children’s relatives or with Ukrainian authorities.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin framed the full-scale invasion as a defense of Russia’s “history, culture, spiritual space” and denied that Ukraine ever has had an “authentic statehood.” That statement reprised his extensive written argument that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” — a fraternal gloss on his condemnation of “the disease of nationalism” in Ukraine.
“The whole lead up to this war was the idea of the denial of the Ukrainian identity — saying that these people really were Russian,” Dr. Cynthia Buckley, an expert on social demography who specializes in the countries of the former Soviet Union, told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “There is an insidious ethnic component here that is quite frightening … part of it is a deep-seated authoritarian ideology that borders on paranoia that basically says ‘If you are not with us, you’re against us. and we want as many with us as possible, and we want as few against us as possible.’”
Some of the evidence for the commission’s “war crime” assessment comes from Russian government maneuvers to confer citizenship on the Ukrainian children, thereby seeming “to create a framework in which some of the children may end up remaining permanently in the Russian Federation,” according to the UN commission. Putin’s lead official for children’s rights has spoken openly of this prospect, as the commission noted.
“Now that the children have become Russian citizens, temporary guardianship can become permanent,” Russia’s presidential commission for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, wrote on social media in July.
Russian officials declined “to establish meaningful communication” with the commissioner throughout the probe, according to the investigators. They also characterized the officials as unhelpful in facilitating the reunification of Ukrainian families.
“Russian authorities violated their obligation under international humanitarian law to facilitate in every possibly way the reunion of families dispersed as a result of the armed conflict,” the report said. “In addition, the citizenship and family placement measures which may have a profound implication on a child’s identity are in violation of the right of a child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations without unlawful interference, as recognized by international human rights law.”
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Mose, the commission chairman, said that the probe could consider a genocide finding in subsequent investigative efforts.
“We are absolutely aware of these possibilities, and we will pursue this if our mandate is being prolonged,” he said. “Where we will go depends on what we will find.”