It was possible to return five children from the temporarily occupied territory of the Kherson region to controlled Ukraine.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson regional administration, announced this.
One child is a 14-year-old girl deprived of parental care. When her guardian grandmother died, she was left alone in the occupation. However, she has now been returned from the temporarily occupied left bank of the Kherson region, and will be taken care of.
Two more families — four children and their parents — also managed to leave. The adults turned to the Save Ukraine charity to help them leave the occupation.
In total, since the beginning of 2024, it was possible to return 16 children from the occupied territories of the Kherson region.
- 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, at least 19,546 Ukrainian children are known to have been forcibly deported to Russia. Ukraine also has evidence that Belarus participates in the deportation of Ukrainian children. It is not known for sure how many children are in the occupied territories of Ukraine since 2014 and 2022.
- In January 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an order granting Ukrainian children Russian citizenship. The order states that orphans and children with Ukrainian citizenship, who were left without parental care, can receive Russian by Putinʼs personal decision, regardless of all or individual requirements of federal legislation. This can be used so that the deported Ukrainian children do not "legally" remain on the territory of Russia — accordingly, it will be more difficult to prove this war crime.