A Silent Crime: Russia’s Abduction of Ukrainian Children

Somewhere in Kherson, a little girl named Margarita once fell asleep in her crib, surrounded by the smell of home. When she woke up, she was in Russia. Her name was different. Her birthplace — rewritten. Her past? Vanished.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, one of the most horrific — and least reported — crimes has been the mass deportation of Ukrainian children. According to Ukraine’s National Information Bureau, over 19,500 children have been officially documented as deported or forcibly transferred. But investigations by Radio Svoboda suggest the real number might be as high as 744,000. That’s not a statistic. That’s an entire city of children — gone.

As of late 2023, just 387 of them have been brought back home. And each return is a miracle. Each case is a battle against falsified birth records, new names, hidden locations, and a government determined to erase who these children once were.

This isn’t chaos. It’s not collateral damage. It’s a strategy.

Take Margarita and her brother Illia. According to a chilling investigation by Suspilne, both children were taken from a children’s home in occupied Kherson and transported to Russia under a fake power of attorney signed by the occupying authorities. They were adopted. Their names changed. Their birthplace reassigned. They became Russian — on paper. But their bodies, their minds, their identities? Those belonged to Ukraine.

What’s happening here isn’t just morally outrageous. It’s illegal.

Under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the forcible transfer of children from one national or ethnic group to another, with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part, is genocide. Not might be. Not maybe. Is.

International humanitarian law — especially the 1949 Geneva Convention — makes it crystal clear: children cannot be evacuated by an occupying power unless absolutely necessary for safety, and even then only with full, informed, written parental consent. Russia hasn’t followed these rules. Not once, in any of the documented cases.

In March 2023, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine declared these deportations a war crime. The commission was explicit: Russia’s removal of children violates international law and not just once, but in a systematic, state-coordinated way.

And it doesn’t stop at deportation. Once inside Russia, these children are handed new names, placed with Russian families, and encouraged to forget their language, their culture, their home. It’s not just erasure. It’s replacement.

French human rights lawyer Emmanuel Daoud, who filed a case with the International Criminal Court, argues that this deliberate assimilation — turning Ukrainian children into Russians — is a clear sign of genocidal intent. Ukraine’s own Criminal Code, Article 442, confirms this: forcibly transferring children to another group, with intent to erase their origin, is genocide.

And proving genocide is hard. It requires three things: clear intent to destroy a group, recognition that the victims belong to that group, and evidence of actions that match those listed in international law — including the forcible transfer of children.

Russia ticks all three boxes.

But even when these children are found, bringing them home is a legal labyrinth. Russia falsifies their documents, buries their identities, and throws up bureaucratic smokescreens. Under Article 50 of the Geneva Convention, an occupying power has no right to change a child’s civil status — yet that’s exactly what Russia has done, over and over again.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine continue to document these violations. In June 2022, former Commissioner Michelle Bachelet announced an investigation into these forced transfers. By March 2023, the UN confirmed what Ukrainians already knew: Russia is committing war crimes — and children are among the primary targets.

But here’s the part that breaks your heart: there is no functioning international mechanism to return these children. No global hotline. No legal pathway. Nothing. They’re gone, and the silence that follows is deafening.

Under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to their name, nationality, and cultural identity. These children are being robbed of all three — and of their right to know who they are, where they came from, and why they matter.

This isn’t just a humanitarian issue. It’s a test of whether the international legal system still means anything. Whether conventions, treaties, and courts can protect a child from being rewritten out of existence.

Because what’s happening isn’t a tragic byproduct of war. It’s a policy — deliberate, calculated, and aimed at erasing Ukraine from within.

The question isn’t whether the world will hear about it. The question is: will it do anything before it's too late?

Olha Burdeina is a sophomore at Brown University concentrating in International and Public Affairs. She is a staff writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at olha_burdeina@brown.edu 

Yani Ince is a senior at Brown University concentrating in History and Political Science. She is a blog editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review. She can be reached at ianthe_ince@brown.edu