Ukraine has opened more than 3,000 criminal cases over Russia’s alleged crimes against children in the country, including dozens of cases of torture, Ukrainian prosecutors said on Thursday.
The allegations include “murders, mutilations, child abduction, forced displacement, deportation, sexual violence against children and kidnapping,” said Yulia Usenko, head of the Department for Protecting the Interests of Children and Combating Violence at the Office of the Attorney General of the Ukraine, to Interfax-Ukraine.
Usenko said that these alleged crimes are “often combined with torture and unlawful deprivation of liberty” and “pre-trial investigative bodies and prosecutors document such crimes in more than 3,200 criminal cases”.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Ukrainian authorities, human rights groups, international bodies and news organizations have documented an overwhelming body of evidence of alleged Russian war crimes and human rights violations. humans.
Russia has repeatedly denied these allegations of torture and human rights abuses.
See also: Ukraine calls Pope Francis speech to young Russians “imperialist propaganda”
According to Usenko, prosecutors documented 75 children who suffered various forms of torture at the hands of Russian forces.
She said 69 of them were located in the village of Yahidne in the northern Chernihiv region of Ukraine. The children were held in a school basement along with adults and their conditions and treatment “are equated with torture,” Usenko said.
Isolated cases of child torture have also been documented in the southern Kherson and northeastern Kharkiv regions, where children were “deprived of liberty and subjected to physical torture,” Usenko said.
“In fact, they were in the torture chambers together with adults, it didn’t matter to the occupants whether it was an adult or a minor child,” she added.
Some children were detained because the Russians alleged that they were spreading information about the movement of Russian military equipment and troops, Usenko said.
Reports of torture against children surfaced after some Ukrainian territories were retaken from Russian occupying forces.
These include 13 cases of sexual violence against children, the youngest of which was a 4-year-old girl, Usenko said.
Russia did not comment on Usenko’s interview.
Deportation of Ukrainian children
Russia’s treatment of Ukraine’s children has long been under international scrutiny.
In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian official Maria Lvova-Belova over an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
The Russian government has defended the practice, saying it is saving children and denies that the deportations are forced. The Kremlin called the ICC’s actions “outrageous and unacceptable”.
Lvova-Belova – a Russian official for children’s rights – and other Russian officials said in July that more than 700,000 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia from conflict zones in Ukraine since the war began.
Ukraine, however, claims that the children were illegally deported and that a much smaller number of children were taken – around 19,500.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had previously said that “371 children were returned to Ukraine after being deported”.
“At the same time, we know for sure that there are at least 19,505 deported Ukrainian children, and this is just a part of all our little Ukrainians who are still with the enemy. And we must return them all.”
A CNN spoke to children and families of children who described being forcibly taken to Russia.
A report released in February detailed allegations of an extensive network of dozens of camps where children were subjected to “political re-education”, including academic, cultural and, in some cases, military education centered in Russia.
A United Nations Security Council briefing last week focused on the impact of the war on Ukraine’s children, with deportations and the treatment of children in the spotlight.
Since the start of the war, at least 545 children have been killed and nearly 17,000 injured, although the actual numbers are likely much higher, according to Rosemary DiCarlo, UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Peacebuilding.
Ukraine’s UN representative Sergіy Kyslytsya said Russia has pursued a policy of mass kidnapping and forced indoctrination of Ukrainian children since 2014.
“Russia’s aggression is about Ukraine’s future and there is no future without children,” he said.
Last week, the US State Department launched new sanctions against more than a dozen individuals and entities involved in the transfer and forcible deportation of Ukrainian children.
The US had already sanctioned Lvova-Belova for her involvement in the scheme. The new measures target five Russian politicians who were “involved in facilitating the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and their adoption by Russian families,” the State Department said.
Source: CNN Brasil
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