Nicknamed the “putin child thief” o “Bloody Mary“, Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian government commissioner for children’s rightsis indicated as the mastermind behind the denounced forced kidnapping and adoption of tens of thousands of children from Ukrainewho with the excuse of the war are taken to Russia for “Russification”.
The Yale American University Humanitarian Research Laboratory, which on February 14 released the most comprehensive report to date on the subject, documented more than 6,000 cases of Ukrainian children from 4 months to 17 years who were relocated to Russia or Crimea.
This figure is, according to the researchers, much lower than reality. Once taken to Russian territory, the children are delivered to families or away in one of the more than 40 specialized centers to follow “integration programs”.
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Russia’s government said “relocation” is a way to save “orphans” or take them for medical care, but parents say their children were kidnapped or pressured to consent to sending them away.
And Maria Lvova Belova leads this policy. In July she wrote on the Russian social network Vkontakte how dozens of Ukrainian children were handed over to families in Moscow: “Thirteen little peas, in identical clothes, were waiting for us on the porch of the orphanage to go to Russia to be with the adoptive parents. And also to see for the first time siblings and older sisters they don’t even remember anymore, because orphans of different ages are raised in different institutions. And only the institution of the family is capable of uniting them today. There are parents in our country who are ready to have five, seven, nine children.”
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“She intends to save the children to place them in homes, to be adopted. They are immediately given a Russian passport, sometimes their name or date of birth is changed, so these children become untraceable. Also, some testimonies report children placed in families and then sent without explanation to an orphanage,” said Galia Ackerman, historian and director of the Desk Russia site.
Before being appointed Commissioner for the Rights of the Child in 2021, Belova was a co-founder of a charity in 2008, a member of the Chamber of Civil Rights, and vice-chair of the All-Russian Popular Front in Penzahis hometown in 2019.
joined the ruling party United Russia the same year and became a senator for the party in September 2020. Subjected to sanctions by Westerners, many international organizations accuse her of being responsible for war crimes.
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38 years old, with the face of madonna renaissance and dapper looking, this former guitar teacher is a fervent christian with a family of 22 children, five of whom are biological and 17 adopted or under protection.
Most of the adoptions were made from projects for disabled and abandoned children that she has run since 2008 in Penza, a city 625 km southeast of Moscow.
“This makes her a very symbolic figure”says Ackerman, “that of a modest woman who is often seen covered with a headscarf like orthodox believers, who therefore defends the values of family, charity, but behind this facade hides a reality probably less rosy”.
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One of the children that Belova adopted is a 15-year-old teenager, found, according to her, along with about thirty others who were sheltering in a basement in Mariupol, a city devastated by the Russians in the Donbas valley.
The woman said that at first he and the other children “they spoke ill of the Russian president and sang the Ukrainian anthem”, but now he sees “how this integration is beginning to take place”.
“Now I know what it means to be the mother of a child from Donbas. It’s hard, but we definitely love each other. I think we can handle anything,” she told Vladimir Putin in televised remarks. “All thanks to you”.
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Belova, accused of “barbaric treatment of children”, said 350 children had been adopted by Russian families and more than 1,000 were awaiting adoption. She explained that these children now “They love Russia now and don’t want to go back to their parents.”
But The Reckoning Projectan American association of journalists and lawyers who document war crimes to bring them to justice, denounces a forced assimilation.
Maria Lvova Belova now wants to install “socio-educational structures” specifically adapted to adolescents on Ukrainian territory, in the territories that were annexed by Russia.
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Ukraine confirmed between 13,000 and 16,000 cases of children deported to Russiawhere they are subjected to “re-education” by the government of Vladimir Putin.
“However, we also have information on many more than number in the tens of thousands. But we just don’t have the official kind of record of those… and this is part of the genocide that the Russian Federation is carrying out against the Ukrainian nation,” said the diputada ucraniana Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze.
In statements to the chain Sky newssaid: “Kidnapping them and turning children into different nationalities by distributing them across the Russian Federation and giving them to Russian families, is just another trace of genocide. that is ongoing right now in the center of Europe”.
However, Daria Herasymchuk, Ukrainian Commissioner for Children’s Rightsshe is sure that the actual number of minors deported is higher.
“The Russians say they have 738,000 Ukrainian children who evacuated, but it’s not an evacuation, it’s kidnapping and brainwashing and it’s an act of genocide. We don’t think it’s that many, so far we’ve documented 16,221, but I think it’s a few hundred thousand. It’s all part of his Russification campaign.”
According to Herasymchuk, the Russians use various methods to bring children to the camps, the main one being killing the parents and taking the orphans.
Other methods consist of kidnapping them from schools, boarding schools or orphanages, or forcibly separating parents and children in so-called “filtration camps”. They also come to deceive parents by sending their children to supposed sports or health camps.
“Children are transferred in two ways,” he explained. Jannine di Giovanni, director de The Reckoning Project. “When parents go through the filtration camps, sometimes there are buses that take the children, take them across the border to Rostov, for example, and fly to Moscow or other cities. But they are also often children interned in institutions”.
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“These institutions, a legacy of the Soviet period, are numerous in the country. Sometimes they temporarily take in children of parents in difficulty. When Mariupol fell, these institutions were opened and the children were taken away. Some are orphans, but many are not. Their parents are alive, but with the war there are so many internally displaced people that we don’t know where they are.”
The Ukrainian government has been protesting the whereabouts of the missing children for several months. Only 307 children have been recovered so far, according to Herasymchuk, and some children were part of prisoner-of-war exchanges.
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Tatiana Vlaiko, from the Ukrainian city of Jersonhe told the British newspaper The Sunday Times what was “forced” to send her 11-year-old daughter Lilya to a two-week summer camp in Crimeaannexed to Moscow, in September.
Even though communication was limited, he managed to get through several times. On those occasions, the girl talked about “fun activities,” but Tatiana was alarmed when her daughter mentioned that everything was in Russian and that the children were forced to sing the Russian national anthem every day.
Later they told him that Lily had been transferred to a different camp and, despite his efforts to contact her, he was unable to find out where his daughter was.
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Lyudmila Motychak, 44, lost contact with her 15-year-old daughter Anastasia, after being sent on a school trip to a “health camp in Crimea”. In a message, the young woman told her mother that she had been told to tell the parents to go to Crimea because they would have “a house and money.”
Inessa Vertash, another mother, originally from Beryslav, said she was pressured to send her 15-year-old son Vitaliy to a camp. She then told how the teenager described the horrible living conditions he and other youths were subjected to in the Russian camp.
“He called me, crying, saying that it is not a camp for children, it is like a prison. There were no sheets on the beds, they were forced to wear old people’s clothes, they were given food only for pigs and they were beaten if they did not sing the Russian anthem. “.
And I add: “He told me that the farm workers were forcing 13-year-old Ukrainian girls to have sex with them.”.
According to the Ukrainian government website Children of War353 children are still missing, 16,221 were deported, 10,147 were found, while only 307 were reunited with their families.
On the other hand, the Yale study published last month revealed that at least 6,000 Ukrainian children were placed in re-education camps throughout Russia, including Crimea and Siberia, annexed to Moscow, for “pro-Russian military and patriotic education.” They clarified that the number is “probably significantly higher.”
US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the report “detailed Russia’s systematic government-wide efforts to permanently relocate thousands of children from Ukraine to areas under Russian government control through a network of 43 camps and other facilities”.
Mass kidnappings of children are also being investigated by Karim Khan, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Courtwho said that “I had never seen anything like it”.
Under the 1948 Geneva convention, the forcible transfer of children and the change of nationality or marital status of that child is considered a war crime. Experts say Russia is in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians during war.
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