An investigation by the Financial Times claims that Ukrainian children kidnapped and brought to Russia in the first months of Vladimir Putin’s “Special Operation” are being offered for adoption by the authorities. And some of them are given a false Russian identity. The newspaper used image recognition tools and public documents, as well as interviews with Ukrainian officials and relatives of the children. So he identified and located four Ukrainian children on the adoption site ‘usynovite.ru’, linked to the Russian government. On the site one of the children is shown with a new Russian name and a different age from documents issued by the Ukrainian government.
Another child is shown with the Russian version of his Ukrainian name. The site does not mention the Ukrainian origins of any of the children, who range in age from 8 to 15. The children tracked down by the FT and whose identities were confirmed by their families through the Ukrainian authorities were taken to the Tula region, near Moscow. And in the Orenburg region, near the Kazakh border. One of them was taken to occupied Crimea. Meanwhile, 17 other children have been identified by the FT on the adoption website. They are all from an orphanage in Kherson. The identities were confirmed in a recent New York Times investigation.
