Why do Russians adopt deported children, and how does Ukraine bring them home? An interview with Ekaterina Rashevskaya, a lawyer at the Regional Human Rights Center.
Sure! Please provide the text you would like me to translate and rewrite while preserving the HTML markup.
https://ua.news/ru/ukraine/zachem-rossyyane-usynovlyayut-deportyrovannyh-detej-y-kak-ukrayna-vozvrashhaet-yh-domoj-yntervyu-ekateryny-rashevskoj-yurysta-regyonalnogo-tsentra-prav-cheloveka2024-12-04 10:46:59
--> Is there a clear strategy in how Russians are hiding the criminal relocation of Ukrainian children?
Yekaterina Rashevskaya: Yes, they have a general strategy, but it was different back in June of this year. Now I see a clear trend. This is very evident in the recent interview given by Putin's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, at the beginning of November.
Now, Russians will claim that children ended up in the territory of the Russian Federation due to private disputes.
If these are children with families, then it will be framed as family disputes. When one family member (mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother, sister) independently took the child to Russia. Meanwhile, other relatives in Ukraine, usually the biological mother or father, were separated from the child. For example, parents serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or arrested by Russians, or due to other circumstances.
3 Photo: Regional Center for Human Rights
We had a case where the mother was simply working abroad. This is the story of many Ukrainians. Well, what can you do? It is not a crime to earn for your children. And the children were separated by the war in the Kherson region. The Russians claimed that the children were living with their grandmother and were evacuated because she gave consent.
We must always remember: if children were deported with an adult, it does not negate the deportation. It does not mean that there is no crime. A small child, an adult, a grandmother, an elderly person, anyone can be deported. They can be deported as a family, just as the Crimean Tatars were taken away in whole families in the past. They can be taken away one by one, they can be separated during the relocation, like the Mezhevi family, and so on. There are many different schemes.
Why are Russians insisting on these family disputes now?
Yekaterina Rashevskaya: Because there is a Convention, long accepted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law, regarding such civil disputes. Hiding behind it, the Russian Federation presents itself as a state where children are simply under its jurisdiction. Therefore, if the parents, in its opinion, are bad, it has the right to take the child and send them to an orphanage. If the grandmother is unable to cope, the child can also be taken and placed in
UA.News continues a series of interviews regarding the return of Ukrainian children from deportation, examining the serious consequences this war crime by the Russian Federation has already had and will continue to have on Ukrainian society.
We present the second part of the interview with Yekaterina Rashevskaya, a lawyer from the public organization "Regional Center for Human Rights." In this interview, she explains in detail how Russians are attempting to conceal the mass deportation of Ukrainian children by manipulating international law, and why there is still no established mechanism for returning these children to Ukraine.
Yekaterina Rashevskaya: Yes, they have a general strategy, but it was different back in June of this year. Now I see a clear trend. This is very evident in the recent interview given by Putin's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, at the beginning of November.
Now, Russians will claim that children ended up in the territory of the Russian Federation due to private disputes.
If these are children with families, then it will be framed as family disputes. When one family member (mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother, sister) independently took the child to Russia. Meanwhile, other relatives in Ukraine, usually the biological mother or father, were separated from the child. For example, parents serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or arrested by Russians, or due to other circumstances.
3 Photo: Regional Center for Human RightsWe had a case where the mother was simply working abroad. This is the story of many Ukrainians. Well, what can you do? It is not a crime to earn for your children. And the children were separated by the war in the Kherson region. The Russians claimed that the children were living with their grandmother and were evacuated because she gave consent.
We must always remember: if children were deported with an adult, it does not negate the deportation. It does not mean that there is no crime. A small child, an adult, a grandmother, an elderly person, anyone can be deported. They can be deported as a family, just as the Crimean Tatars were taken away in whole families in the past. They can be taken away one by one, they can be separated during the relocation, like the Mezhevi family, and so on. There are many different schemes.
Why are Russians insisting on these family disputes now?
Yekaterina Rashevskaya: Because there is a Convention, long accepted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law, regarding such civil disputes. Hiding behind it, the Russian Federation presents itself as a state where children are simply under its jurisdiction. Therefore, if the parents, in its opinion, are bad, it has the right to take the child and send them to an orphanage. If the grandmother is unable to cope, the child can also be taken and placed in