Russia and Ukraine have agreed to exchange displaced children. The agreement stipulates that 29 children should be taken to Ukraine and 19 to Russia, Russian children’s rights representative Maria Lwowa-Belowa said on Wednesday in Doha, where representatives of Ukraine and Russia met with Qatari mediators.
The Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, did not confirm the information to the AFP news agency. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a “group of sixteen Ukrainian children” had been released and “reunified with their families” in Qatar. He did not respond to Russian information about the exchange.
Moscow is accused of abducting Ukrainian children to Russian territory. In this context, an arrest warrant was issued against Lwowa-Belowa by the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2023. The Kremlin’s children’s rights commissioner gave no details about why the children were in Russian hands or where they came from.
“For the first time we spoke face to face with the Ukrainian side,” Lvova-Belova added. However, Lubinets said that Ukraine and Russia had no direct communication on the matter.
Moscow: children from combat zones brought to safety
Kiev estimates that Russia has abducted more than 19,000 Ukrainian children since the invasion began in February 2022. Only 400 have been returned so far. Some of them reported on the Russian patriotic education to which they had been exposed. They would also have been forced to praise the Russian army. The Kremlin denies the accusations. Therefore, the children were removed from combat areas for safety reasons.
Some children’s parents were killed and other families were separated by the rapidly changing front line as the invasion began. Some children lived in Ukrainian orphanages in Russian-occupied territories.
Source: Krone
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