More than 2,000 children illegally taken to Russia have been contacted

The Commissioner for Persons Missing in Special Circumstances, Artur Dobroserdov, said this in a commentary in The Hague.

“As part of information interaction with the National Information Bureau, today we have information about more than 23 thousand children deported to the territory of the Russian Federation. Currently, more than 600 such children have been returned to the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government, with more than two thousand more children were able to establish contact. Currently, the fate of about 21 thousand children remains unknown,” he said.

Dobroserdov also noted that, “unfortunately, given the number of cases of deportation of children, we understand that not in every case an application to search for a child is submitted to the National Police; accordingly, not in all cases, DNA is taken from their close relatives in relation to deported children.” .

According to him, in the short term it is planned to compare the list of children missing under special circumstances, available to the commissioner, with the list, which is at the disposal of the Ministry of Reintegration, regarding deported children, “in order to identify all cases for which the National Police of Ukraine no application has been submitted to search for the child, and accordingly their search is not carried out, which makes it impossible to place information in our Register and provide the status of a “person missing under special circumstances” and, accordingly, for Ukraine to fulfill all obligations to search for such persons.”

After this, as Dobroserdov noted, “we plan to search for close relatives or family members of deported children in order to restore family ties and take away biological samples from them. We really understand that in different cases of children, the military-political leadership of the Russian Federation changes their last name, first and patronymic, constituent personal data, grants citizenship of their country, with the aim of terminating close political and legal ties with Ukraine, destroying the self-identification of these children, as well as implementing their integration into Russian society."