Maria Zakharova’s assertion that Kyiv’s claims about the abduction of 20,000 children are false and lack evidence is not consistent with the conclusions of international investigations and legal rulings.
According to Russian media outlets quoting Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Ukrainian claims that Russia has abducted 20,000 children from Ukraine are false.
“There are no abducted Ukrainian children in Russia, as they claim. This must be understood as the starting point for any discussion of this issue,” stated Zakharova.
Such statements from the Russian side are outright lies, refuted by numerous investigations conducted by international organisations. Since 2022, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine have documented multiple cases of children being forcibly transferred, which constitutes a war crime.
In one of its reports, the Commission confirmed that the relocation of children was not justified by safety or medical concerns and that written parental consent was absent. This directly violates international humanitarian law.
Human Rights Watch and other human rights organisations have documented cases of Ukrainian children being forcibly transferred to Russia. They have also highlighted the lack of transparent procedures for returning children to their legal guardians, as well as the absence of cooperation from the Russian authorities.
In 2023, it is important to note that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights, on charges of the illegal deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children. The warrants state that these actions were not justified by any legal grounds and violate the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In April 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) recognised the deportation and forced displacement of Ukrainian children as an act of genocide. PACE pointed to the systematic and large-scale nature of these actions, as well as to the imposition of Russian citizenship on children and their illegal adoption by Russian families.
According to Ukrainian and international sources, tens of thousands of children have been transferred or deported from temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia or other occupied areas. The final figure is difficult to determine due to the lack of access to the occupied regions and the Russian authorities’ reluctance to provide information, but international organisations confirm the scale of these crimes.
By the summer of 2025, Ukrainian and international organisations had only managed to return 1,347 of the thousands of children who had been taken.
Thus, there is ample independent evidence that Russia has systematically and illegally displaced thousands of Ukrainian children. This is recognised as a war crime under international law.
Earlier, StopFake refuted similar claims that Ukraine had illegally transferred d 85 disabled children to the EU, where they were ‘put up for sale’, and that a Ukrainian boy had testified in The Hague that his father had been ‘eaten by Russians’.
