Genocide is one of the most severe international crimes. The meaning of genocide and the acts that fall under it are defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide or the Genocide Convention of 1948 and in Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. According to them, genocide is defined as an act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, any national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

These actions include killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Conspiracy to commit genocide, public incitement to genocide, attempt to commit genocide and complicity in genocide are also punishable crimes.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has been going on for 11 months, gives the reason to believe that the Russians may be openly and consistently committing at least one of the above-mentioned actions, which can be interpreted as genocide. We are talking about the mass transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia.

The Russian occupation authorities started displacing Ukrainian children immediately after the beginning of the aggression on February 24 and the seizure of Ukrainian territories. Moreover, the facts given below are express evidence that such actions could have been pre-planned and are part of a broader plan, coordinated by the Russian top leadership.

In the spring, Ukrainian Commissioner of Children’s Rights, reported that as of May 2, 181,000 children had been illegally transferred to Russia. According to the official information of the aggressor, 183,168 children were already taken to Russia at the beginning of May. As we can see, the numbers are very close.

 In the summer, the Russians military reported on more than 307,000 Ukrainian children taken to Russia. As we can see, the process has become of massive and systemic nature. In addition to the military, reports of the deportation of minor Ukrainians to Russia were also disseminated by the civil authorities. For example, the family and youth administration of the Krasnodar region posted on its website the information about more than 1,000 children from captured Mariupol, who were transferred to Russian families in Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, and Altai regions for adoption. The information has since been deleted, but the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has a link to an archived version.

Generally, the geography of the forced displacement of Ukrainian children is quite wide. They were taken out of all the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine including Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. At the same time, the forced transfer of children from the occupied Ukrainian regions known as the self-proclaimed “Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics” also took place under the guise of ‘evacuation from bombings.’ The main destinations were the Vladimir, Omsk, Rostov, Chelyabinsk, Saratov, Moscow, Leningrad regions and Sakhalin. These are not border regions at all, but territories thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.

Unfortunately, today it is impossible to establish the exact number of Ukrainian children forcibly displaced to remote regions of Russia. Furthermore, in the eleventh month of the Russian aggression, the kidnapping of young Ukrainians continues. There are many instances of children being taken away even now, allegedly for vacation or rehabilitation, and then they do not come back.

The forcible transfer of children by the Russians is not a chaotic or one-time action, it is a well-organized process. This can be evidenced by the following.

Removal of children from Ukraine is controlled by Russia at the highest state level. The Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia personally came to the occupied territories to monitor the process.

Also, as noted by the office of the Ukrainian Commissioner for Human Rights, the forced deportation was prepared in advance: Ukrainians, including children, were first taken to filtration camps, and then distributed among the regions of Russia. Each region had its own plan about how many people, where to and who exactly should be brought.

Courtney Austrian, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), also confirmed that filtration camps had been identified. At the OSCE meeting in Vienna, Austrian said that such camps were set up in schools, sports centers and cultural institutions captured by Russian troops. In her opinion, the Russian authorities were preparing to “filter” Ukrainians even before the start of the invasion of Ukraine. According to the mission, there are 18 filtration camps in the territories occupied by Russia. At the same time, the Reuters news service, referring to the research data of Yale University, has already reported on 21 such camps.

Once the Ukrainian minors, having passed the “filtration” they were brought to the territory of Russia, the process of their “legalization” – rooting into the Russian environment – began. In particular, the state procedure of establishing guardianship and adoption is used.

As far back as on March 9, Putin instructed to simplify the procedure for obtaining guardianship over deported Ukrainian minors at the legislative level. This was done because allegedly “there was a queue of Russians willing to establish guardianship over the Ukrainian children.” And in May, Putin issued a decree regarding a special procedure for accepting children from Ukraine to Russian citizenship. It pointed out that orphans and children left without parental care who are citizens of the “Donetsk People’s republic”, “Luhansk people’s republic” or Ukraine, shall acquire citizenship of the Russian federation in a simplified manner.

Today, Russia is conducting an active state propaganda campaign regarding the adoption of forcibly displaced Ukrainian children intending to integrate them into the Russian community. It is worth noting that the Russian children’s ombudsman has even adopted a Ukrainian child who was taken out of occupied Mariupol. And the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, personally boasted that he had taken “difficult” teenagers from Ukrainian boarding schools. In addition, Russian social networks are spreading video stories about adopted Ukrainian children, united under common title: “childhood. return”.

Evidently, such mass forcible resettlement of Ukrainian children in violation of the norms of international humanitarian law is carried out by Russia for the sole purpose of their further “Russification’, to erase national identity and transform their Ukrainian consciousness into Russian consciousness.

There is an abundance of evidence for this. According to the Russian media, a group of adopted children who were taken from Mariupol to the suburbs of Moscow during the war had a negative attitude toward Russia but then they “turned it into love.” At beginning, Ukrainian children sang the National Anthem of Ukraine, spoke negatively against president Putin, and shouted “Glory to Ukraine!”. But after their “integration” into Russian families, they changed.

Kadyrov threatens to conduct “military-patriotic education” for the Ukrainian children transferred to Chechnya. The above-mentioned propaganda videos about adopted Ukrainians with the telling title “childhood. return” contain the whole essence of the displacement – the return to Russia of allegedly “lost” Ukrainians in accordance with the “one nation” thesis proclaimed by Putin.

Removal of Ukrainian children against their will under the control of the occupying state, filtration, preparation of the legislative framework for their integration into Russian society, a public advertising campaign to encourage such actions and further “re-education” and assimilation – all these are components of one plan which constitute a specific pattern of conduct. This process can hardly be considered simply a deportation.

 According to  Article 49 of the  IV Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, it is prohibited, regardless of the motives, to carry out forced individual or mass resettlement or deportation of protected persons from the occupied territory to the territory of the occupying state or to the territory of any other state, regardless of whether it is occupied or not. The Statute of the International Criminal Court recognizes the deportation or forcible transfer of people as a war crime (Article 8 (a) viii))  or a crime against humanity ( Article 7(d)), depending on the circumstances under which such acts are committed.

To qualify actions as deportation or forcible transfer, it is necessary to establish that the perpetrator deported or forcibly transferred, without grounds permitted by international law, one or more persons to another state or place by expulsion or other coercive acts. International criminal law distinguishes between two types of resettlement of people – deportation (movement across the state border) and forcible transfer (within the territory of the state border). Thus, in the case of the Prosecutor v. Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, Case No. IT-03-69-T, Judgment (TC), 30 May 2013 the court found that the crime of deportation requires the movement of victims across a de jure state border, or, in certain circumstances, a de facto border. Forced displacement involves the displacement of persons within national borders. A similar position is contained in case of Prosecutor v. Krnojelac, “Judgement”, IT-97-25-T, 15 March 2002, para. 474 and in other practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

It is obvious that during the crime of deportation, the intention of a perpetrator is to forcedly transfer people from the territory of one state to the territory of another state. The aim of such a crime is the forcible transfer of persons against their will from a territory where they were staying legally.

However, the facts given above show that the Russians’ aim is not limited exclusively to the territorial movement of children. Here we can talk about their removal from one community (group) and integration into another one. According to the practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the term “national group” is interpreted as a collection of people who are perceived to share a legal bond based on common citizenship, coupled with reciprocity of rights and duties. Thus, the citizens of Ukraine – the Ukrainian people – are a national group in the meaning of Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and Article 6 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. Similarly, the national group in the same context is the people of the Russian Federation – Russian citizens bound by common citizenship.

The actus reus of the process of Ukrainian children’s transfer does not end with solely their physical placement on the territory of Russia, it continues through their integration into the national group of the Russian people. It is evidenced by the above-mentioned acts of the Russian state regarding the special procedure for obtaining guardianship over minor Ukrainians and the accelerated procedure for granting them Russian citizenship. These measures enable a legal bond between the displaced children and the new national group. At the same time, a cultural, linguistic, and educational integration takes place. Children live in Russian families, get Russian education, everything is done for them to consider themselves Russians. It is accompanied by public propaganda of such actions, which gives reason to consider this process as a deliberate conduct with a specific intent to destroy Ukrainian nation as a protected group.   

Therefore, the mass resettlement of Ukrainian children seems to have clear signs of violation of the Article II (e) of Genocide Convention which defines the forcible transfer of children from one national group to another as genocide. In fact, the office of Prosecutor General of Ukraine is already examining such cases as possible crime of genocide.  The facts  that Russian high-ranking officials are aware about  massive assimilating the Ukrainian children into Russia and eradicating their Ukrainian identity as well as their broad engagement into this process  may provide evidence of intent to commit genocide.

          Unfortunately, such actions continue. And who knows how many thousands of Ukrainian children have already been “integrated” into Russia in this way? Who can say whether they still realize that they are Ukrainians? Will Ukraine be able to bring them home? There is no answer to these and many other questions today. But the main question is – will the Russians be taken to account for their crime of genocide?

Volodymyr Pylypenko is a PhD in Law and Associate Professor in the International Relations Department at Lviv University of Business and Law.

Read more on this topic in the Asian Journal of International Law.