Five Ukrainian and Russian children separated from their families during the four-year-old European war are back with their relatives, first lady Melania Trump announced 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 statement released by the White House. “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.”
Thursday marked the fifth time kids affected by Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II have been reunited with their families since the first lady announced this past October that she established an “open channel” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the topic.
At least 27 children have been brought back home on these occasions, with at least 22 of them coming from Ukrainian families.
Thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from homes, orphanages, and boarding schools — mainly in the occupied east of the country — to Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Some youths were put on a twisted Russian adoption database where they could be sorted by age, eye color, and number of siblings, in what non-governmental humanitarian groups called “digital child trafficking masked as bureaucracy.”
Those not taken in by Russian families have been sent to more than 200 facilities to undergo pro-Kremlin “re-education” and military training, according to a report last year by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.
The United Nations said in March of this year that it had verified the abduction of more than 1,200 kids across five regions of Ukraine. However, the Kyiv government has claimed the true number is 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.
