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Ft, «Moscow offers kidnapped Ukrainian children for adoption»
Ukrainian children kidnapped and brought to Russia by Moscow’s forces in the first months of the invasion in 2022 are being offered for adoption by the authorities, in one case under a false Russian identity: this is what emerges from an investigation by the Financial Times (FT). Using image recognition tools and public documents, as well as interviews with Ukrainian officials and relatives of the children, the FT identified and located four Ukrainian children on the adoption site ‘usynovite.ru’ linked to the Russian government. One of the children is shown with a new Russian name and a different age on 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 the Orenburg region, near the Kazakh border. One of them was taken to occupied Crimea. The identities of 17 other children identified by the FT on the adoption website, all from an orphanage in Kherson, were confirmed in a recent New York Times investigation.
