Ukrainian children continue to pay what the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) called “an extraordinary price in lives lost and upended” due to Russia’s invasion.
UNICEF said the war has had “a devastating impact on the country’s 7.5 million children,” with the U.N. verifying that nearly 2,000 children had been injured or killed as of May.
Ukraine’s children have also faced forcible deportation to Russia, where they are subject to re-education. That, the U.S. State Department, said, reflects Moscow’s “systematic efforts to suppress Ukraine’s identity, history, and culture.”
Ukraine estimates Russia has deported or forcibly displaced nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children as of July 26.
In July 2023, Russian children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova said as many as 700,000 Ukrainian children had entered Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The International Criminal Court has charged Lvova-Belova and Russian President Vladimir Putin with the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.
Moscow has sought to deny those allegations by using the propaganda technique known as “accusation in a mirror” — in which the aggressor accuses its victim of committing the crimes that it has committed or plans to commit.
The Kremlin has also spread unfounded conspiracy theories to implicate Ukrainian authorities and military forces in extreme abuses against its own children.
On July 24, Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency ran an interview with an unidentified man, whom the report described as an evacuee from Ukrainian-controlled territory in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.
The man claimed there were several instances in which the White Angels, a special unit of Ukraine’s National Police helping people evacuate from frontline areas, had taken children from the region. Citing neighbors, the man speculated the Ukrainian military and the White Angels took those children to “harvest their organs,” or “deliver them to pedophiles.”
Neither the man in the video nor RIA Novosti cited any evidence or named any victims to support the allegations.
These claims fit into state-sponsored efforts to deflect attention from the war crimes allegations Putin and Lvova-Belova are facing regarding the abduction of Ukrainian children.
Anna Kuznetsova, deputy speaker of the Russian parliament who co-chairs Russia’s “Parliamentary Commission on Investigation of the Crimes Committed by the Kiev regime Against Minors,” has been instrumental in those efforts.
Last year, Kuznetsova accused Ukrainian authorities and the White Angels of selling children into sexual slavery or facilitating the harvesting of their organs.
Kuznetsova specifically referred to the White Angels as “professional kidnappers,” although the group does not force people to leave against their will.
Kuznetsova went so far as to claim, without evidence, that the sale of children’s organs constitutes 7% of Ukraine’s economy.
Kuznetsova presented her accusations in a June 2023 report that was released roughly three months after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova.
Apart from false claims about children, Russia has repeatedly spread false or unfounded reports about organ harvesting in Ukraine since first invading the neighbor’s eastern regions in 2014.
In 2019, Russian media alleged a “special medical group” was harvesting soldiers’ organs for export to Europe at facilities in Donetsk.
VOA determined that alleged medical centers in the cities of Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, where Russian media alleged the organ harvesting was taking place, did not exist.
Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia resurrected that claim, baselessly implicating the Ukrainian Red Cross Society in the illicit practice.
The families of deceased Ukrainian soldiers, in turn, said the bodies of the servicemen returned by Russia were missing organs or bore signs of torture.
Those practices, if independently confirmed, would constitute war crimes.
Since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, Moscow has attempted to portray itself as the protector of Ukrainian children and falsely alleged Ukrainian forces target and otherwise exploit their own children.
That includes a widely debunked story spread by Russian state media, which claimed the Ukrainian army publicly crucified a 3-year-old boy in the eastern Ukrainian town of Slavyansk in 2014.
Moscow has also falsely accused Ukrainian victims of its attacks, including a pregnant woman who was injured in a 2022 Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, of being crisis actors.
By contrast, the evidence suggests Russia has used actors and unreliable witness testimonies to spread disinformation about Ukraine.
