Ukraine returns four more children from Russia and occupied areas

This was announced on Facebook by the founder of the Save Ukraine charity, the Ukrainian President’s Envoy for children's rights (2014-2021), Mykola Kuleba.

According to him, "the children finally met their families after a long separation. Some of them had not seen each other for almost two years. Parents had been struggling to take some of them back for months as the Russians sought to move those children to a rehabilitation center. Fortunately, these trials are over and now all these children are safe."

Kuleba said this was the 15th Save Ukraine rescue mission, adding that "in total, we managed to return 231 Ukrainian children from Russia and temporarily occupied territories."

As Ukrinform reported earlier, Reuters published a large-scale investigation into how Russian officials and collaborators had been abducting Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied areas.

According to Yale University, more than 2,400 Ukrainian children between the ages of six and 17 have been illegally removed from Ukraine to Belarus since the outset of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The deportation of Ukrainian children was the reason for the International Criminal Court in The Hague to issue on March 17, 2023, an arrest warrant for the Russian President's Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, and Vladimir Putin himself.

Ukraine verified more than 19,000 cases of deported and/or forcibly removed children.