119 children taken from occupied Mariupol to St. Petersburg for re-education – CNS
3 January 08:52
The occupation authorities have taken another group of Ukrainian high school students from the temporarily occupied Mariupol to Russia. 119 students will be forced to undergo so-called “re-education” for participating in propaganda activities. This was reported by the Center of National Resistance, Komersant ukrainskyi reports.
Such systematic deportations of Ukrainian children are carried out with the aim of assimilating them and imposing Russian identity. During these “educational” events, they try to form a sense of belonging to the “Russian world” and a hostile attitude towards everything Ukrainian.
The Center also reports cases where children were unable to return home after such “school excursions,” which indicates that the abduction of children is being used as a tool of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
The National Resistance Center calls for reporting such cases through the anonymous chatbot of the National Resistance Center.
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Abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia
on February 1, 2024, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin reported that during the war, Russia forcibly removed 19,546 children from Ukraine under the guise of “humanitarian operations.” This official figure has not changed since then.
“These children are not only displaced, but also deprived of their Ukrainian identity: they are granted Russian citizenship, placed in Russian families, forced to undergo re-education in Russian, and forbidden to speak Ukrainian. Teenage boys are often forced to participate in militarization programs,”
– Kostin said.
At the same time, this estimate of the scale of abductions of Ukrainian children is not the only one and certainly not the highest. In particular, the main organizer of these abductions, the so-called Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Russian Federation, Maria Lvova-Belova, in the summer of 2023, mentioned the figure of 744 thousand Ukrainian children “taken by the Russian Federation.” Russia does not provide any data on this process and is not accountable to anyone, so it is almost impossible to verify the veracity of this statement.
Darya Gerasymchuk, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, questions the figure mentioned by Belova and believes that it is a standard exaggeration of Russian propaganda. The Ukrainian side estimates that there may be 200-300 thousand abducted Ukrainian children. These estimates are approximate, as we are talking about children from the occupied territories and information about them is collected in a variety of ways.
However, the Ukrainian side has absolutely accurate data on abductions, including personal data, only for 19,546 children. That is why this figure is officially announced, although everyone understands that it is quite far from reality.
