Secret talks to return Ukrainian children taken by Russia

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Saudi Arabia and Turkey are looking to strike a deal to repatriate Ukrainian children taken to Russia and placed in children’s homes or adopted by Russian families, according to four people familiar with the talks.

Authorities in Kiev and Moscow are compiling a previously unreported list of thousands of children who have fled to Russia since President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as part of a mediation process.

Months of highly sensitive talks indicate that third parties are still looking for ways to agree on a deal between Ukraine and Russia, in the hope that they will lead to possible peace talks aimed at ending the war. can be developed into channels for

Roman Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea Football Club who has previously mediated peace talks, prisoner swaps and grain deals as Putin’s unofficial envoy to Ukraine, is also involved in the discussions, according to two people familiar with the matter. .

The need for mediators highlights the complexity of repatriating displaced Ukrainian children, an issue that led the International Criminal Court in March to charge Putin as well as his children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova with war crimes.

The issue is so contentious that unlike some previous prisoner swaps or ceasefire talks, Ukrainian and Russian officials have refused to speak directly to each other.

“There is no (direct) communication with the Russian side,” said Daria Herasimchuk, children’s rights commissioner in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office. “Moreover, we are convinced that there can be no negotiations in this direction, because it is not a question of exchanging prisoners of war, they are civilians, they are children.”

According to a diplomat with knowledge of the talks, Saudi Arabia discussed the need for third parties to talk to both Ukraine and Russia about the displaced children at a meeting of officials of selected G20 members in Copenhagen in June. Raised as part.

The diplomat said Western countries gave Riyadh its blessing to continue mediating on the children and other issues, including a grain deal, contamination fears at a Russian-owned nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine and a possible nuclear escalation.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tried to build on his role as peacemaker by brokering a grain deal and several prisoner swaps, as well as failed talks to end the war last year.

Spokespeople for Putin, Zelensky, the Turkish government and Abramovich did not respond to requests for comment. The Saudi government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ukraine alleges that Russia arranged the abduction of more than 20,000 children with the clear intention of erasing their Ukrainian identity. Yale’s Humanitarian Lab says at least 6,000 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia, while Russia’s official figures still count less.

Neither side has kept a centralized record of how many Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russia, the people said, while giving a full count of the varying circumstances in which they were taken or where they were sent. , it has been difficult to decide.

“There is a situation when mom and dad are on Ukrainian territory. There is another place where mom and dad are not there, but there is an aunt in Voronezh (southern Russia), ”said a person with knowledge of the conversation. “The goal is to count all the children to figure out how many children there are and then find the best solution for each child.”

Russia has used children in Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine as a propaganda tool to justify its invasion.

Some children brought to Russia are enrolled in “patriotic” classes where they sing the Russian national anthem, are taught that the Ukrainian nation never existed, and are told that Moscow is waging a war against “Nazism”.

Ukraine claims Russia is trying to erase the children’s Ukrainian identity, which Kiev calls a form of genocide. Herasimchuk said, “We are well aware that their actions were not chaotic, but they had a planned genocidal policy towards us.” “They are kidnapping children to replenish their dying nation.”

Another factor complicating the conversation is the different ways children arrive in Russia.

While some were forcibly taken away by Russian troops in the early weeks of the invasion and publicly paraded, others were brought there by pro-Russian relatives or sent to Russian summer camps when Ukraine took back their hometowns. So they were separated from their families.

Although Russia has said it will allow any children to be returned to Ukraine if a legal guardian can physically retrieve them, the parents themselves must do so as Kiev and Moscow refuse to be directly involved in the issue. Are.

Many Ukrainian parents lacked passports or money to travel, making the roundabout route into Russia via Poland and Belarus or the Baltic states even more challenging. Some 370 children – a small proportion of the total number who remain stranded in Russia according to Kiev – have returned to Ukraine after being displaced.

Mediators hope that both Ukraine and Russia can agree on the number of children their families will be able to retrieve.

“It is very sensitive, no one trusts anyone. They need an independent body which will have the data of all the children and will be accepted by both the countries,” said a person involved in the talks.

Additional reporting by Adam Samson in Ankara