Five Ukrainian and Russian children who had been separated from their families during the four-year war in Europe have been returned to relatives, first lady Melania Trump said Thursday morning.
“While diplomacy and peacebuilding are important to this effort, they are surpassed by our collective ability to place children above international disputes,” the Slovenia-born Melania said in a White House statement. “Every reunion is a reminder that compassion, dignity, and family can transcend even the darkest of times: war. My representative and I continue working with the governments of Russia and Ukraine to safely return children to their families and communities.”
The announcement marked the fifth time children affected by Europe’s largest conflict since World War II have been reunited with family members since the first lady said in October that she had opened a direct channel with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the issue.
Across those reunions, at least 27 children have been brought home, including at least 22 from Ukrainian families.
Since Moscow began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainian children have been removed from homes, orphanages and boarding schools, primarily in the country’s occupied eastern regions, and taken to Russia.
Some children were listed in a Russian adoption database that allowed users to filter them by details such as age, eye color and number of siblings — a system humanitarian non-governmental groups described as “digital child trafficking masked as bureaucracy.”
Children who were not placed with Russian families have been sent to more than 200 sites for pro-Kremlin “re-education” and military training, according to a report released last year by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.
The United Nations said in March that it had verified the abduction of more than 1,200 children across five regions of Ukraine. Ukrainian officials, however, have said the actual figure could be as high as 20,000.
The global body’s Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said that while Russian authorities claimed the removals were for safety reasons, the fact that 80% of the children had not been returned after four years of war indicated otherwise.
Of those who had come back, the Commission highlighted complaints of starvation and lack of medical care — while in at least one case, an abducted adolescent had taken their own life.
“The children who come back are subdued mentally — they’re broken,” Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska told The Post in August of last year. “… Only after they return do they start coming back out of their shells.”
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin in connection with war crimes related to the abduction of Ukrainian kids.
