The Russian ambassador to the United Nations accused Portugal, Spain and Germany on Wednesday of having taken “hundreds” of Ukrainian children from their mothers to place them in reception centers in their respective territories, having presented testimonies of these alleged cases.
“I am Alina Komisarenko, from the city of Zaporizhia. My child was taken by the youth system in Portugal”, says a woman in a video presented by Russia in an informal meeting of the Council of Security to address “the measures taken by the Russian authorities to remove children endangered”.
The veracity of the testimonies presented by the Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN cannot be verified.
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya, whose country chairs the UN Security Council this month, accused Western countries of wanting to stifle the fact that children in European countries are being taken from Ukrainian refugees.
The ambassador then mentioned Portugal, Spain and Germany as examples of countries where this happens.
“The number of people who have been through this is in the hundreds. Small children are being taken to shelters by strangers. Mothers who try to get their children back are threatened with criminal prosecution,” the diplomat accused.
On March 17, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges for his alleged involvement in child abductions in Ukraine.
In a statement, the ICC accuses Putin of being “allegedly responsible for the war crime of illegal deportation of population (children) and illegal transfer of population (children) from the occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
At stake are thousands of institutionalized Ukrainian children who were forcibly transported to Russia or to the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops.
A report on the Systematic Program for the Re-education and Adoption of Children from Ukraine from Russia, released in February by the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health (HRL), estimates that more than 6,000 Ukrainian minors are placed in 43 rehabilitation centers. education or Russian orphanages after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The report admits that the number could be much higher.
The non-governmental organization (NGO) Human Rights Watch (HRW) states, in another report, that thousands of Ukrainian children living in orphanages were forcibly transferred to Russia or the occupied territories.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, until the end of February, 16,221 children were deported to Russia, a figure that the UN Commission on Human Rights could not confirm.
Source: TSF
