📋 Tender Overview
“The United Nations has verified that at least 2,406 children have been killed or injured since February 2022, an average of two children per day,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell told a Security Council meeting this morning that was unanimously concerned about the situation of Ukrainian children, with the exception of Russia. “Behind these numbers are children, each with a name, loved ones, broken dreams,” she added, a point echoed by the United States, which chaired the meeting and also sought to give a personal and human dimension to this conflict that has just passed the 1,000-day mark.
Ms Russell described the appalling living conditions of Ukrainian children, often confined in dark, cold underground shelters for hours each day to escape the bombings. She noted that more than 20 per cent of Ukrainian schools have been destroyed, forcing some children to attend classes in freezing subway stations. These conditions, she said, are causing severe trauma: a third of Ukrainian parents report persistent signs of psychological distress in their children.
The toll paid by Ukrainian children in this war was detailed by Ms Kateryna Rashevska, legal expert at the Regional Centre for Human Rights in Kyiv: 593 children killed, 1,707 injured and 15,000 orphaned. Nearly 3 million children live in extreme vulnerability, often exposed to serious violence, including rape and torture, she explained. Added to this is limited access to drinking water for 1.7 million children and to sanitation for 3.4 million, Slovenia noted. Several delegations, including the European Union, also condemned the bombing last July of the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv, the largest in the country.
Despite this alarming picture, Ms. Russell highlighted the crucial role of UNICEF and its partners, which have provided clean water to 5.1 million people in 2024, psychosocial services to many children and caregivers, and educational support to more than 450,000 children. However, she stressed the insufficiency of humanitarian assistance alone, urging the Council to act immediately to protect children, by ending attacks on critical infrastructure (schools, hospitals, energy grids) and banning explosive weapons in populated areas, particularly anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions, which cause disproportionate suffering to children.
A Kremlin-led forced adoption and foster care program
She also expressed alarm at the large number of Ukrainian children separated from their families. Mr. Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at Yale University School of Public Health, echoed these concerns as he briefed the Council on the findings of his institution’s report published yesterday on Russia’s program of forced adoption and fostering of Ukrainian children. The investigation, the result of 20 months of collecting and analyzing open-source data and commercially available satellite imagery, identified 314 children from Ukraine who, following Russia’s invasion of their country in February 2022, were taken into care under this systematic program run by the Kremlin. Of these, 208 were adopted from Russia and 67 were naturalized Russian citizens.
On behalf of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Latvia considered that this policy is not just an “unintended” side effect of Russian aggression, but a deliberate tactic aimed at erasing Ukraine’s future. Mr. Raymond compared these actions to the Nazi crimes tried at the Nuremberg trials, when Third Reich officials were convicted of forcibly transferring Polish children to Germany in order to Germanize them. He finally accused Russia of manipulating its databases and urged Ms. Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, to provide a complete list of displaced Ukrainian children, including their place of origin, current location and any changes to their personal information.
A request also made by Ms Rashevska, who recalled that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Ms Lvova-Belova for these crimes. She estimates, for her part, that more than 19,000 Ukrainian children have been illegally deported to Russia under the pretext of evacuation since February 2022, and that more than 40,000 are displaced each year from the occupied territories to re-education camps in Russia and Belarus, where they undergo militaristic indoctrination.
She cited the example of the Avangard camp in the Volgograd region, where 300 children received military training, including tactical exercises and parachute jumps. She also said that Russia had illegally replaced Ukrainian education with a Russian education system in the occupied territories, politicizing and militarizing schools in order to eradicate Ukrainian identity. “Stripping children of their identity and their families” in this way was a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and a systematic attempt to erase Ukrainian identity, she said, joined by the United Kingdom, which said that the very future of Ukraine was under threat.
Crimes that will remain "engraved in history", according to Ukraine
Russia strongly rejected accusations of abductions and forced deportations of Ukrainian children, calling them “systematic lies” and “propaganda” orchestrated by the United States and its allies to politicize the Security Council. The delegation attributed the problems affecting Ukrainian children to the “unconstitutional coup” of Maidan in 2014, arguing that the Ukrainian Government was persecuting Russian-speaking populations by restricting the use of their native language.
Regarding the movement of children, Russia affirmed its respect for international humanitarian law, specifying that the majority of the “evacuated” children were accompanied by their parents or guardians.
