Yale University researchers offer what they say is strong evidence of war crimes by Vladimir Putin in a new report alleging Russia's president and senior Kremlin officials authorized the coerced fostering and adoption of Ukrainian children. It finds 314 children as young as 2, mostly from Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, have been placed in a "systematic program of coerced adoption and fostering" since the Russia-Ukraine war broke out in February 2022. Putin and senior Kremlin officials "intentionally and directly" authorized the program, according to the report released Tuesday, which claims "a higher level of crime than first understood," per the New York Times.
Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab verified leaked documents showing how Russians worked with the heads of the pro-Russian administrations in Russian-occupied provinces to carry out the program with funding directly from the Russian president's office, per the Times. The children were flown out of Ukraine on Russian military planes and more than 20% have been naturalized as Russian citizens, per the report. "It basically creates a method by which their Ukrainian identity can be erased," Nathaniel Raymond, the lab's executive director, said Tuesday, per NPR. The researchers, to present their findings Wednesday at a special meeting of the UN Security Council, say this could constitute a war crime and might support a case of genocide in the International Criminal Court.
Putin and his commissioner for children, Maria Lvova-Belova, have already been named in an ICC arrest warrant for their roles in taking Ukrainian children into Russia. The report identifies others with roles in the program, including Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov and Anna Kuznetsova, a senior official in Putin's United Russia party. The Kremlin denies committing war crimes and paints the adoptions as efforts to help abandoned children. Some of the children were orphaned or had been removed from their parents, while others were taken from parents with custody rights, according to the report. It adds there are thousands more Ukrainian children in Russia who have not been identified. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for allies' help in bringing the children home. (More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
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