“In Ukraine it was common that if a child was born with a disability in a family with few resources, the social services pressured them to send them to a state institution because they would take better care of them there, which is completely false,” explains the senior researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW) Ukraine Yulia Gorbunova. As a result of this practice, widely reviled by international child rights organizations, Ukraine was already the country with the most minors in Europe before the war, after Russia.
90% of the more than 105,000 hospitalized children were not orphans; but they were placed in the residential system because the families, many of them poor, could not support them. Half of them had some kind of disability.
More than a year after the Russian invasion, Kyiv has lost track of large numbers of these children, worsening a situation that the authorities had failed to remedy. Human Rights Watch urges the government of Volodimir Zelensky (and the international community that finances it) to take steps to remove these children from the centers in a report released Monday.
Titled We must provide a family, not rebuild orphanages, the text recalls that despite the fact that the government has adopted plans to reduce the number of children in institutions since 2007, the number of inmates increased by more than 700 in 2019. “Parents in Difficult circumstances or poverty do not receive the necessary support from the State to take care of their children”, laments Gorbunova.
Even when some of these children have been returned to their families, over time, only a third remain with them, according to the Ukrainian researcher for HRW about a study that was carried out among 1,300 minors last November.
Children transferred to Russia
To all this we must add another problem, which supposes a violation of international law and a potential war crime, says HRW: the forced transfer of children from these children’s institutions to areas occupied by Russia or to the territory of the Russian Federation. This NGO believes that there would be thousands of them and many with parents who want to get their children back, says Gorbunova. Exact figures are difficult to give. According to Ukrainian government data, one hundred institutions that housed more than 32,000 children by 2022 are in regions under partial or full Russian occupation.
A study by the Yale University Research Laboratory published in February indicates that since the start of the war more than 6,000 Ukrainian minors, between four months and 17 years of age, have been captured and sent to Russian re-education camps or smuggled fraudulently into the Russian adoption system. Russia’s parliament changed laws last May to allow authorities to grant Russian nationality to Ukrainian children, in order to facilitate adoption by Russian families. Russian officials have assured that hundreds of Ukrainian children have been adopted and even personalities close to President Vladimir Putin have publicly thanked him for having been able to adopt any of these children. It is unknown, however, how many of them belonged to children’s institutions.
“There must be a concerted international effort to identify and return children who were deported to Russia, and Ukraine and its allies must ensure that all children who were or remain institutionalized are identified and supported to live with their families and in communities,” urges HRW deputy director for children’s rights, Bill Van Esveld, in the report.
Gorbunova reveals that the Zelensky government is very focused on the first lawsuit, as well as Moscow’s prosecution of war crimes, “which is understandable.” But she insists that there is a lack of will for the second: “We would like to see what solutions his government can provide at the national level in order to deinstitutionalize” these children. And more in a context of war, where the situation of Ukrainian families will worsen and, with it, the fate of the following generations.
