Kyiv has blamed Moscow on Tuesday of having organized illegal mass adoptions of Ukrainian children after transferring them from occupied territories to Russia.
Since the starting of the war, Kyiv has been accusing Moscow of “deporting” Ukrainians, saying Ukrainians from occupied territories have been forced to go to Russia rather than other regions of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement, that, “The Russian Federation continues to kidnap children from the territory of Ukraine and arrange their illegal adoption by Russian people.”
The statement mentioned, “Over 1,000 children from Mariupol, a southern Ukrainian city occupied by the Russian military, were illegally transferred to outsiders in Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, and Altai Krai.”
The foreign ministry said it had based its findings on information from local authorities in Krasnodar, a southern Russian city near Ukraine.
As per the statement, “More than 300 Ukrainian children are “held in specialized institutions” in the Krasnodar region.
The ministry has blamed Russia for actions that “grossly violate the 1949 Geneva Convention” that establishes rules for humanitarian treatments in wartime and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It called for “all Ukrainian children, who were illegally displaced to the territory of Russia, (to) be returned to their parents or legal guardians.”
Several families from Mariupol told AFP that they had been forced to go to Russia to flee the fighting.
Mariupol was surrounded in the previous days of the invasion.
According to Ukrainian estimates, Russia fully seized the city after weeks of siege and intense shelling that left around 20,000 dead.