“Putin’s child snatching is crime against humanity, UN says”, The Times
Report from its independent international commission accuses Russia of having a co-ordinated state policy, with the active involvement of the president
Liz Cookman
Tuesday March 10 2026, London
Russia has committed a crime against humanity through its forcible transfers of thousands of Ukrainian children to territory under its control, a UN inquiry has found, with President Putin’s involvement “visible from the outset”.
The abductions of children — which some estimates place in the tens of thousands — are a co-ordinated state policy organised at the highest levels of government, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said.
In a report released on Tuesday, the UN inquiry concluded that the scale and systematic nature of the acts meant they amounted to crimes against humanity.
• The Ukrainian children waiting for parents who may never return
“The evidence collected demonstrates that the authorities have acted pursuant to a policy conceived and executed at the highest level of the Russian Federation state apparatus,” the commission said.
In a relatively forthright move for a UN body, the report singled out Russia’s head of state. “The involvement of Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, including through his direct authority over entities that have steered and executed this policy, has been visible from the outset,” it said.
It confirmed that at least 1,205 children have been transferred or deported to either Russia or the parts of Ukraine it occupies since the full-scale invasion four years ago. The vast majority of the children, 80 per cent, have not been returned as Moscow has failed to establish a system to facilitate it.
Even in the days before the war, Russia was preparing to transfer children, the inquiry said. It suggests the large-scale relocations are not “evacuations” to protect the children from the risks of war, as Russia claims, but are premeditated.
Maria Lvova‑Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, with Putin; she is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, REUTERS
Instead of returning the children, Russia has focused on their long-term placement with families or in institutions in at least 21 regions of the country. Some have been pushed into adoption or appeared in online adoption databases. Many have been given Russian citizenship.
Representatives of the UN Inquiry also included testimonies from children who had been deported to Russia. “They bring you without documents, then they give you Russian documents and they consider the children as theirs, as if they belong to them,” one Ukrainian boy said.
Another child said staff at a school had warned pupils they should be ready for “evacuation”, but when one of the children said he would call his mother, they said: “Yes, you can call your mum, but, in any case, we will evacuate you.”
President Putin’s involvement was “visible from the outset”, the UN said. SPUTNIK/GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/REUTERS
“If you don’t come with us, the Ukrainians will put you in a basement and torture you,” staff added.
International humanitarian law, the report said, “mandates that evacuations must be temporary and take place for reasons of compelling health, medical treatment, or safety”.
The report also mentions foreign nationals recruited, sometimes through deception, to fight for Russia. It identified people from 17 countries, including Iraq, Kazakhstan, Somalia and Turkey, who are usually assigned “extremely dangerous duties” and subjected to “extreme violence” by commanders.
The findings regarding deported children echo a previous report by the commission that said the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children is a war crime, as is the delay to their repatriation.
A crime against humanity is defined by human rights groups and lawyers as a large-scale attack targeting civilians at a time of peace or war.
The International Criminal Court had previously issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova‑Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, in 2023, accusing them of war crimes over the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children. Lvova-Belova has openly said she adopted a 15‑year‑old boy who was taken from the city of Mariupol as Russia laid siege to it.
The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab has estimated that at least 35,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territories since February 2022. It has called it the largest missing persons case since the Second World War and has warned of coerced adoption, indoctrination and forced military training for Ukrainian teenagers.
The return of Ukrainian children has been a central concern in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, AP
Last year it published data on a network of at least 210 facilities in Russia and Russian‑occupied territory where Ukrainian children have been subjected to re‑education programmes designed to promote pro‑Russian narratives and, in many cases, training with weapons and drones.
Some returned Ukrainian children have reported being served draft papers by the Russian military.
More conservative estimates of the number of stolen children put the figure closer to a few thousand.
The Ukrainian non-governmental organisation (NGO) Save Ukraine has warned that adoption databases include children who grew up in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, areas occupied by Russia-aligned forces since 2014. It says children have been systematically deported and transferred to Russian families for over a decade.
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The return of Ukrainian children has been a central concern in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, with Kyiv pressing Moscow to facilitate repatriation as part of broader negotiations over occupied territories and prisoner exchanges.
With Russian authorities failing to inform parents or legal guardians of the whereabouts of children, families have often had to carry out their own efforts to locate one another. Mothers often have to make daring journeys into Russia to retrieve their children amid the continuing conflict.
Lvova-Belova, seen here in Chechnya, is said to have supervised the mass kidnapping of orphaned children from Mariupol and other Ukrainian places, PRESS SERVICE OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSIONER FOR CHILDREN’S RIGHTS/ALAMY
Some families remain separated years after the children were taken and NGOs emphasise that long-term psychological harm could leave them vulnerable well beyond the conflict.
In December, the UN general assembly demanded by a wide margin that the Kremlin immediately and unconditionally return all Ukrainian children. Russia rejected the resolution as politically motivated.
The commission was established by the UN Human Rights Council after Putin launched the full-scale invasion in 2022.WorldRussia-Ukraine war