Kuleba at UN General Assembly: Putin has imperial tumor in his head

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba calls on UN member states to put maximum pressure on Russia to make it stop violations against children and return them to Ukraine.

As an Ukrinform correspondent in New York reports, Kuleba said this at the open debate of the UN General Assembly "Situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine" and read excerpts from the diaries of children who survived the horrors of war.

"Why have these and millions of other Ukrainian kids been robbed of their childhoods? Because Putin has an imperial tumor in his head? Because Russia doesn’t mind the suffering of children to achieve its sick political goals?" Kuleba said.

According to him, the full-scale Russian invasion deprived all of Ukraine's 7.5 million children of their normal lives. Almost two-thirds of them have been internally or externally displaced. Russia has killed at least 494 Ukrainian children and injured 1052 more. At least 379 have gone missing during hostilities.

Right now, Russia continues mass abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children, Kuleba added. "A disgusting, heinous genocidal crime, for which Putin and his children's rights commissioner [Maria Lvova-Belova] are already wanted by the International Criminal Court," he noted.

To date, at least 19,474 children have been illegally deported, 4,390 of them are orphans or deprived of parental care, the minister emphasized, adding that only 383 children have been returned so far.

"We should jointly demand that Russia immediately provide the list of children it took from Ukraine and grant access to them for international human rights and monitoring missions. Russia must free Ukrainian children and return them to their families," Kuleba emphasized.

He also called for the development of new international instruments for punishing the abduction of civilians and ensuring the safe return of civilian hostages.

According to the Rome Statute, the detention of civilians can be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity, and is also a tool of Moscow's genocidal war, the minister emphasized.

According to Ukraine’s National Police, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 8,800 civilians have become victims of enforced disappearances and remain illegally detained, with more than 10,200 people considered missing.

As reported, Dmytro Kuleba pays a working visit to New York, where he takes part in the UN Security Council meeting and an open debate of the UN General Assembly regarding the situation in Ukraine.