Dec. 4 (UPI) — The United States on Wednesday announced visa restrictions against five Russian officials accused of involvement in the Kremlin’s systematic forced deportation of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.
The punitive measure from the U.S. State Department was announced as the United Nations Security Council held a meeting on the effects Russia’s war in Ukraine has had on children.
Daria Zarivna, advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine, told the diplomats that nearly 20,000 Ukraine children have been forcibly deported from Ukraine to Russia amid the war, in what she called “the largest kidnapping campaign in the modern history.”
“Yet, the actual figure could be much higher,” she said.
The United States and other democratic countries and organizations have accused Russia of operating a large-scale forced adoption system in which Ukrainian children are taken to parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces or into Russia itself.
In February, the U.S. State Department issued a report stating there were at least 32 facilities where Ukrainian children are exposed to pro-Russian education without their parents’ consent. Purported orphans and those taken from institutions are deported for adoption or placement in foster care.
The Yale School of Public Health on Tuesday said it has identified 314 children “who have been subjected to Russia’s system of coerced adoption and fostering” since the war began in February 2022.
Of those children, 148 were listed in Russia’s child placement databases and 166 had been placed with Russian citizens.
“These identifications resulted from cross corroboration of multiple points of data to a high confidence standard, including, but not limited to photographs, travel itineraries, physical characteristics, official Russian documents and other specific details related to each child,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, said during the U.N. meeting.
According to the Yale report, the Russian air force and aircraft directly under the control of President Vladimir Putin’s office has transported “multiple groups of children” from Ukraine for placement with Russian families. This system, it said, has been ordered and facilitated by Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, presidential commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia.
Lvova-Belova is among those the United States and others, including Britain, have sanctioned over Russia’s forced deportation campaign. The International Criminal Court has also issued a warrant for her arrest.
However, Russia denies the program’s existence.
Vasily Nebenzya, permanent representative to the United Nations for Russia, told the U.N. meeting on Wednesday that “the majority of children entered Russia with their families, fleeing Ukrainian shelling.”
He accused the United States of “politicizing” the 15-member body’s work.
Meanwhile, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., accused Russia of committing war crimes during the meeting, including the forced deportation of children.
She said Russia obscures all traces of the children it takes.
“Russia’s forces have assigned these Ukrainian children new Russian names, Russian passports and subjected them to Russian ‘military-patriotic’ indoctrination programs. They have punished children for speaking Ukrainian, lied to them about the fates of their families and communities, and forced them into adoptions with Russian families. In other words, Russia has sought to systematically erase these children’s identities.”
Thomas-Greenfield announced during the meeting that the U.S. State Department was pursuing visa restrictions against the five unidentified Russian officials.
In a statement, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the punitive actions would target not only the five officials but “authorities backed or installed by Russia” for their involvement.
“As it fights to defend its very existence as a sovereign, independent state, Ukraine is grappling with the extraordinary challenge of locating these children, negotiating their release, bringing them home, and providing the critical support they need,” Miller said.
“We are deeply concerned by the increasing number of reports of Ukrainian children being wrongfully adopted by Russian citizens. The deportation of children from Ukraine is a deliberate, systematic effort by the Kremlin that began even before its full-scale invasion.”