RUSSIA is allegedly running a grotesque online “slave catalogue” of abducted Ukrainian children in occupied territory.
The profiles can be searched by hair colour, eye colour and even “personality” in the latest twisted move by Mad Vlad Putin’s regime.
According to the NGO Save Ukraine, it features almost 300 children labelled as “orphans” or “left without parental care”.
However, campaigners argue that many children have been forcibly removed from their families, re-registered with Russian documents, and are currently being “matched” with Russian families, akin to animals in a pet store.
Mykola Kuleba, head of Save Ukraine, described it as “digital trafficking” and a “slave catalogue”.
He warned: “This is not adoption. This is not care. This is digital child trafficking, masked as bureaucracy.
“These children are not ‘war orphans’. They had names, families and Ukrainian citizenship.”
The Times reports that this unethical search tool purportedly enables users to filter children based on age, gender, health, physical traits, and even personality, such as whether they are “calm” or “active”.
The platform is managed by Luhansk’s so-called Ministry of Education and Science, which forms part of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), a regime established by Russia in a region that is internationally acknowledged as Ukrainian territory.
While some of the children featured were born post-2014, after Russia’s occupation of the area, Kuleba asserts that the majority were born prior to the takeover and held Ukrainian citizenship.
Kyiv claims that the child cataloguing is merely the latest phase in Moscow’s extensive child abduction program, which Ukrainian officials allege has resulted in tens of thousands of minors being taken since Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Yale researchers, UN experts and legal bodies have said the deportations could amount to war crimes.
In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Putin and his children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, concerning the unlawful transfer and adoption of Ukrainian children.
Russia has long defended these relocations as “humanitarian” – but Ukrainian officials and returned captives tell a far darker story.
Survivors have described being beaten, starved, locked in basements, forced to sing the Russian national anthem, and banned from speaking Ukrainian in re-education camps.
Some say they were told their parents had abandoned them.
Earlier this year, Moscow announced plans to send 60,000 kidnapped Ukrainian children to remote summer camps in the wilderness – a move critics see as deepening indoctrination.
Ukraine’s presidential adviser Daria Zarivna has accused Putin of “weaponising” these children, warning they are being groomed to fight for Russia in future wars.
She told The Sun: “It’s a threat to global security, to Ukraine’s security.”
Lvova-Belova – dubbed “Putin’s childcatcher” and sanctioned by Britain for her role in the abductions – has openly bragged about “adopting” a boy from Mariupol.
‘I was snatched by Russian soldier’
ILLIA, 11, was deported from Mariupol after a Russian missile strike killed his mother and left him with horror shrapnel wounds when he was nine.
His neighbours buried his mum’s body in their back garden before he was snatched by Vlad’s soldiers and taken for surgery at a camp in Donestk.
The shrapnel was removed without any anaesthetic and he was forced to write and speak Russian and repeat “Glory to Ukraine as part of Russia”.
He says Russian forces tried to turn him into a “propaganda tool” but that he is not “one to be duped so easily.”
Illia’s grandmother had been searching for her grandson ever since losing contact with her daughter in March 2022.
It wasn’t until they spotted the young boy in a video from Russia that she realised he was alone and that her daughter had been killed.
His grandmother never gave up hope and set about getting her injured grandson back home where he belonged.
Months later, Illia returned home to Ukraine and had further surgery to remove more fragments from his leg, while 11 remain.
His grandmother Olena said: “He had a school, he had a home, he had a mother and he lost all of that – his entire childhood.
“He kept to himself, he was afraid of noise, he was afraid of sirens. He had no memory.
He now has dreams of becoming a doctor so that he can help fighters on the frontline as a combat medic.
She is accused of overseeing the heartless bureaucratic machinery that strips Ukrainian children of their identities before placing them in Russian homes.
Kyiv’s Bring Kids Back Ukraine initiative has so far rescued nearly 700 minors, but thousands remain missing.
Officials say no peace deal will be struck with Moscow until every abducted child is returned.
“This is genocide,” said Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets.
“These children are not commodities. They are victims of a brutal campaign to erase our nation’s future.”
