The Human Cost of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Forced Displacement and Cultural Erasure

February 24, 2023 marked one year since Russia began its brutal invasion of Ukraine, and one year that the Ukrainian people have defied all odds to defend their identity and their freedom. Since the start of the war, undeniable evidence has emerged of rampant human rights violations by Russian forces, including actions that rise to the level of crimes against humanity. One crime in particular, that has received relatively little attention in international press coverage, is Russian forces’ deportation from occupied Ukraine of over a million civilians, in particular children.

Some reports suggest that these deportations are effectively a mass hostage-taking, with Russia possibly hoping to use these civilians in prisoner exchanges or to otherwise extract concessions from Kyiv. However, indications are that Russia has an even more sinister motive as well: there is evidence that many of the deportations, particularly those of Ukrainian children, are with the purpose of forcibly assimilating the deportees as Russians, as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial of the very existence of Ukrainians as a distinct people. But regardless of motive, Russia’s deportations are a blatant violation of international law protecting non-combatants, and their prosecution must be integral to any postwar efforts to facilitate justice for Ukraine.

Since the start of the war, Russian forces have forcibly transferred around 1-1.6 million Ukrainians within occupied Ukraine and to Russia, according to a wide range of sources including former Ombudsman for Human Rights in Ukraine Lyudmila Denisova, the US State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Many of these civilians were fleeing Russian military offensives, most notably the siege of Mariupol, which ended on May 20, 2022 with much of the city destroyed.

As part of the process of deportation, Human Rights Watch has described Russian forces subjecting Ukrainians fleeing hostilities in Mariupol and the Kharkiv region to a series of abusive security screenings, involving collecting biometric data and searching belongings and phones, euphemistically termed “filtration” by the occupiers. HRW writes that “Ukrainian civilians were effectively interned as they waited to undergo this process, with many reporting that they were housed in overcrowded and squalid conditions, for periods [ranging from] as short as several hours to almost a month.” Witnesses told the Associated Press that one elderly woman “died in the cold.” The BBC interviewed a Ukrainian couple from Mariupol who said the filtration center they were held in was “like a true concentration camp,” that lacked mattresses or blankets, and where a dysentery outbreak occurred due to poor sanitation.

Last July, a statement by the US State Department asserted that “thousands” of Ukrainians who do not pass filtration have been detained and disappeared. These individuals have been subjected to torture and even, in an unknown number of cases, summary execution. Ukrainians have failed filtration for a wide variety of reasons, such as “potential affiliation with the Ukrainian army, territorial defense forces, media, government, and civil society groups.” Deportees have had their Ukrainian passports confiscated, and some were pressured to sign documents denouncing Ukraine.

Those Ukrainians who pass filtration have been transported to various cities and towns in Russia, including as far as Vladivostok, with most sent to isolated and impoverished areas. Deportees have found themselves stranded with no identity documents or usable money (as they only carry Ukrainian hryvnia), left with no way to reunite with family or travel back to Ukraine or to a third country. Russian authorities have promised to provide deported Ukrainians with Russian identity papers and funds (of only 10,000 rubles or $170), but these promises have often not been kept, leaving many deportees unable to find jobs or housing.

Over the past year, a litany of evidence has emerged, in particular, of Russia’s forced transfers of Ukrainian children without their parents, in the most blatant sign that the deportations are ultimately a project to erase the victims’ Ukrainian identity. Precise numbers are hard to come by: while the Ukrainian government website Children of War lists 16,226 deported children as of writing (using figures from the National Information Bureau), other sources have put the number of child deportees in the hundreds of thousands. The Russian government, via then-head of the National Defense Management Center Mikhail Mizintsev, admitted last June that over 300,000 Ukrainian children were on Russian soil. TASS, a Russian state-owned news outlet, gave the number of Ukrainian children in Russia as 728,000 in January 2023.

Some of these children’s parents have been killed in the war; many others’ have been separately detained and/or deported by Russian forces. Others have relatives in Ukraine, who have been unable to secure custody of the children, or even contact them. Children have been taken from hospitals and orphanages. Caregivers at Kherson Regional Children’s Hospital and other institutions in occupied Kherson and its environs have successfully prevented Russian authorities from taking children, including newborns, by falsifying records.

A recent report by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University finds that Ukrainian children have been sent to at least 43 facilities in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea, all but two of which operated as recreational summer camps prior to the war. The children in the camps range in age from a few months to 17. Most of the 43 facilities are in Crimea and elsewhere around the Black Sea, although three are in Siberia or the Russian Far East. According to the report, the “primary purpose of the camps appears to be political re-education.” The Russian government has advertised the camps as “integration programs,” designed to assimilate the children as Russians and indoctrinate them with pro-Russian propaganda. All levels of government are implicated in the system of camps, as are local schools and universities, who have been involved in providing this “education” to child deportees.

The Yale report documents one boy who was told he would not be allowed to return due to his pro-Ukrainian views; another was told his return was conditional on Russian forces’ recapturing Izyum, following Ukrainian forces’ September 2022 offensive in Kharkiv oblast. As of writing, at least two of the camps, including one of the largest – Medvezhonok on the Russian Black Sea coast, holding about 300 children mainly from Kharkiv oblast – have said they will stop all returns of children to Ukraine indefinitely. As indicated in the Yale report, the evidence suggests that this decision was made in response to the success of the September offensive.

Last summer, Russia announced that 350 Ukrainian children, ostensibly orphans, had been placed in the custody of Russian households, with over a thousand more in line for adoption. Russian state media frequently announces the arrival of groups of alleged orphans from occupied Ukraine, claiming they are refugees from war and will be placed with new families. Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children without permission from their country of origin, but in May 2022 Putin signed a decree to streamline the process of adopting Ukrainian “orphans” and enable them to receive Russian citizenship.

The Russian government is also offering financial incentives for Russian families to adopt Ukrainian children, further demonstrating how kidnapping has become official state policy. Apart from Putin himself, the single individual who bears the most responsibility for organizing the child abductions is Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. The chief public promoter of the adoptions, Lvova-Belova has gone as far as to adopt a Ukrainian teenage boy herself; she is the target of multiple sanctions from the US and other countries. Other key perpetrators named in the Yale report are Commissioner for Human Rights Tatyana Moskalkova, who has played a leading role in propagandizing the adoptions as a humanitarian initiative, and who personally facilitated the transfer of 120 children from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic to a camp in Crimea last August; and Minister of Education Sergey Kravtsov, who oversees the curriculum taught through the camp system, including the message that a separate Ukrainian identity does not exist.

Russia’s deportations violate the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV), which was passed in 1949 to protect non-combatants in wartime, following the mass atrocities of World War II. Ukrainian civilians are entitled to crucial safeguards as protected persons under Article 4 of GC IV: “those who at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of … [an] Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.” Most relevant to the deportations is Article 49: “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power … are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Furthermore, “the Protecting Power [in this case, Ukraine] shall be informed of any transfers and evacuations as soon as they have taken place;” something Russia clearly has not done.

Other provisions of GC IV specifically apply to Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children. Article 50 says, “the Occupying Power … may not, in any case, change [children’s] personal status,” which Russia has violated through forced adoptions and denationalization of Ukrainian children. Article 33 prohibits collective punishment, or the punishment of protected persons for actions they have not committed, which may be pertinent regarding the reports of returns of children in Medvezhonok and potentially other camps being blocked in retaliation for Ukrainian military advances.

The deportations of children, and the attempts to erase their Ukrainian identity, could very well rise to the level of genocide. Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, one of the actions that constitutes genocide is “forcibly transferring children of a [national, ethnic, racial, or religious] group to another group.”

Regardless of the specific prosecutable offense, the forced transfer of Ukrainian civilians by Russian authorities represents a breach of the most basic tenets of international law, and evidently is endemic to Russian operations in Ukraine and facilitated by the highest levels of the Russian government. Ukrainian authorities, and the international bodies assisting them, must make every effort to bring those responsible to justice, and to ensure that all deportees are returned and reunited with their families.

Author: Benjamin Reicher, Pomona College, United States of America

Illustration: Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, Obligation du port de la cocarde (c. 1792-1794, Musée Carnavalet)

© CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet. This work is in the public domain.