For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours ! - CSO
Why we are calling on the ICC
The first association to alert public opinion and the French government to the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children in Russia, Pour l'Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nous! filed a communication with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in December 2022, which contributed to the issuance of arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his "Children's Rights Commissioner" for acts then described as "war crimes".
His lawyers, Emmanuel Daoud and Gabriel Sebbah, filed a second communication in September 2024 documenting the scale of the crimes committed against Ukrainian minors. It reveals the extent of the network of complicity, which largely involves the United Russia (RU) party, and calls on the ICC to extend its warrants to other senior officials and to reclassify these crimes in order to increase judicial pressure on the
Russian power.
The investigation on which this communication is based demonstrates in fact the determining role of United Russia, the dominant political party throughout the Russian Federation, and of the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF) movement, a coalition political movement, both under Putin's control, in the planning and implementation of these acts of a planned and systematic process of deportation and forced adoption of minors.
Ukrainians in Russia.
She intends to demonstrate:
- The nature of the organization set up by the United Russia party.
- The genocidal desire to eradicate the Ukrainian identity of minors in the occupied territories.
How many minors are affected?
It is impossible to quantify with certainty the number of Ukrainian children who are victims of Russian crimes and particularly of deportation, in the context of the occupation of 18% of Ukrainian territory and because of Russia's refusal to reveal the names and locations of the stolen children. The available data therefore vary depending on the indicators used and the sources.
However, it is established that out of 7.5 million children present in Ukraine before 24/02/22, there are 3.2 million left today. The missing 4 million are either refugees in Europe, dead, or deported to Russia.
By cross-referencing several sources (Ukrainian, Western and Russian) it is estimated that at least 300,000 Ukrainian children were deported to Russia.
But this figure is even higher if we rely on data from the UNHCR (the United Nations Refugee Agency), which estimates the number of people transferred to Russia at 3 million. Knowing that the age pyramid of Ukraine in 2021 indicates that 15% of the population is under 14 and 20% is under 19, this would represent a total of 450,000 minors.
Of this total, only 19,546 cases have been officially documented by Ukrainian authorities.
The same uncertainty regarding repatriations: the NGO Save Ukraine announces 397. But this figure, which concerns isolated minors, should probably be multiplied by 3 for repatriations of accompanied minors.
Uncertainty also characterizes the number of adoptions, Russia not communicating data. But on the basis of partial data and taking into account the means (financial, legal, logistical, communicational...) released by the Putin regime for the
favor, it is plausible that the number of adopted Ukrainian minors is several thousand.
More broadly still, if we consider all the forced Russification actions perpetrated by Russia and described in our investigation, we estimate that they concern around one million Ukrainian minors among those who were present in 2021 in the territories conquered by the Russian army and the vast majority of whom were unable to escape the occupation.
Based on demographic data and the evolution of the territories of Ukraine controlled by the Russians, we can indeed conclude that approximately 7 million Ukrainians are still subject to Russian occupation. A projection based on the age pyramid indicates that 15% of the population is under 14 years old and 20% is under 19 years old.
We therefore deduce that 1 to 1.4 million minors were victims of at least one of the crimes documented in our investigation.
Crimea, Chernihiv region (liberated after a few weeks) and Kharkiv region (whose inhabitants were largely liberated) are not taken into account.
