ECHR hears how 10 children went missing after Russia annexed Crimea

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian President Vladimir Putin is a wanted man. Not only for the alleged war crimes Ukraine has been accusing him of, but also his suspected role in the “unlawful deportation and transfer” of children from Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia, according to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes,” the court said in 2017, when issuing an arrest warrant for him and Maria Lvova-Belova, his children’s rights commissioner.

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On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) heard a case concerning 10 Ukrainian children who were forcibly transferred from Crimea after Russia’s 2014 annexation and put up for adoption.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union (UHHRU), which lodged the case, argued that Russian nationality was imposed on the children who were taken from childcare institutions. The group says that as there has been no information on their whereabouts since 2014, despite the Ukrainian authorities’ repeated requests, this amounts to enforced disappearance.

Ahead of the hearing, the special envoy of the Council of Europe Secretary General said it is a reminder that “we must keep Ukrainian children at the heart of the political agenda”.

“Behind every case is a child whose fate matters, whose identity must be protected, and whose whereabouts must be known. We must not stop asking questions and demanding answers,” said envoy Thordis Kolbrun Reykfjord Gylfadottir.

‘Tracking these children is, unfortunately, extremely difficult’

In total, four Ukrainian human rights and journalistic groups accuse Moscow of violating the international Convention on the Rights of the Child, levelling various charges including deporting children, illegal adoption and changing children’s identities and nationalities.

The change of identity, including their first and last names and even dates of birth, is the reason “very little is known about these (10) children  – or about such children in general,” Onysiia Syniuk of the Zmina rights group told Al Jazeera. “Tracking these children is, unfortunately, extremely difficult,” she said.

The children in Tuesday’s case were between one and five years old in 2014, and were given to Russian families for adoption, according to Denys Chistikov, one of the top Ukrainian officials dealing with affairs on the occupied Black Sea peninsula.

“It’s precisely through these 10 cases that Ukraine aims to demonstrate the systematic nature and scale of the Russian Federation’s policy,” Chistikov said, though hundreds more are feared to have been affected.

Moscow in 2014 created the Train of Hope Crimea, a controversial adoption programme that showed “video profiles” of children on Kremlin-run television networks to facilitate their adoption or transfer to Russian orphanages, he said.

Observers say the children became part of a narrative for Crimea’s “return to the motherland” and against Ukraine.

The alleged practice continued and widened after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the partial occupation of several Ukrainian regions.

Russian officials reject the accusations, claiming that children have not been abducted but are rather rescued from war zones through humanitarian efforts.

Children brainwashed and ‘militarised’: Ukrainian official

Over the years, Ukrainian children are said to have been taken from orphanages and boarding schools and sent to “summer camps” in Crimea for months, and then relocated to orphanages or foster families in Russia.

Chistikov said many have been sent to “specially prepared settings” where “Russia’s occupation policies” are justified.

They enter Russia’s school system, where the Kremlin has introduced classes on the reasons for Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s campaign to “restore traditional values”.

According to rights groups and teachers who have fled Russia, schoolchildren are made to sing the Russian anthem and declare Ukraine a “terrorist state” as they are taught that the collective West instigated the war.

They are brainwashed and “militarised,” Chistikov said.

Some children in Russia have received basic military training and have donned gas masks.

“Two girls refused to put gas masks on because they had makeup on and had fancy hairdos, and got Fs,” a teenage girl from the western city of Ryazan told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity to talk to foreign media.

Kyiv has claimed that the overall number of children and teenagers taken from occupied Ukrainian regions is close to 20,000, the majority of them seized after 2022.

“Russia needs all Ukrainian children on occupied Ukrainian territories; it wants to turn them into Russian nationals any way it can,” said Syniuk of the Zmina rights group. Moscow wants to “fully Russify them through its education system, through its militarisation system in occupied areas, and to do everything to make them so-called future patriots of Russia and serve for its benefit,” she said.

Moscow declared Syniuk’s group illegal, and forbids its work in Russia.

After the two-hour-long hearing on Tuesday, ECHR Judge Lado Chanturia said that the court will deliberate on the “admissibility and merits of the case” and did not specify a potential date for a ruling.

One Ukrainian man who was taken has his own explanation as to why Russia wanted him.

“When children are cut off from their parents, when they pour the same [information] into their ears, the children break,” said Denys Kostev, an orphan from the southern city of Kherson.

He was 17 when he was taken to a Crimean children’s camp in 2022 and ended up in an orphanage outside Moscow.

He managed to flee Russia via Belarus and Germany and return to Ukraine earlier this year to enlist in the Ukrainian military.

“Children don’t have a guide, an adult; they believe, they break,” Kostev told Al Jazeera days before departing to a military training camp.