It was possible to return 11 children from the occupied part of the Kherson region to Ukraine

Another 11 children, including two orphan girls aged 10 and 13, were brought to Ukraine from the temporarily occupied part of the Kherson region.

Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Kherson regional military administration, reported this.

It was also possible to return nine children who have parents or one of them. These are five girls and four boys aged from 1 to 16 years.

All children are safe now. Doctors and psychologists work with them. Since the beginning of 2024, 78 children from the occupied part of the Kherson region have been returned to Ukraine. The Save Ukraine organization, the guardianship and guardianship authorities, as well as the childrenʼs services of the region and the childrenʼs parents worked on the return of the children.

Deportation of Ukrainian children

In the face of a full-scale invasion, Russia is mass-deporting Ukrainian children from the occupied territories of Ukraine. They are taken to the occupied Crimea, Russia or Belarus, allegedly for rehabilitation or rest in camps. Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that it is known for certain that more than 19,300 children were deported by the Russians.

The deportation of Ukrainian children is one of Russiaʼs war crimes, for which the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin and the Childrenʼs Ombudsman of the Russian Federation Maria Lvova-Belova. Currently, it is known about the forced deportation of at least 19,546 Ukrainian children to Russia, less than 400 of them were returned. Ukraine also has evidence that Belarus participates in the deportation of Ukrainian children.

• In January 2024 , Putin issued an order granting Ukrainian children Russian citizenship. The order states that orphans and children left without parental care, with Ukrainian citizenship, may receive Russian citizenship by Putinʼs personal decision, regardless of all or individual requirements of federal legislation. This can be used so that deported Ukrainian children do not "legally" remain on the territory of Russia — accordingly, it will be more difficult to prove this war crime.