Previously, our Association repeatedly reported on the mass abduction of youth by the Russian invaders in the summer of 2022 from the occupied part of the Kherson region under the guise of supposedly “rehabilitation”, children were taken to the occupied Crimea or to the Russian Federation.
In particular, in Yevpatoria, the Russian occupiers concentrated up to 2,000 criminally “evacuated” children in September on the basis of Ukrainian departmental children’s sanatoriums seized in 2014: “Druzhba”, “Zdravnitsa”, “Luchistiy”, “Mriya” and “Chaika”. We have already reported that since around November, the children have been in difficult living conditions, had significant problems with food and warm things.
Currently, ARC expert Professor Borys Babin reported on the “Facebook” about the new Russian occupiers’ crimes. He points to the facts of sexual violence against children and the alleged forced removal to Chechnya of certain “evacuee” children as de facto slaves. At the same time, the expert states, until December 2022, many occupiers and collaborators did criminal “PR” on the background of children, and the last time these children were publicly mentioned in the aggressor’s propaganda on December 16.
Later, from the last days of December 2022, all these “evacuated” children of the aggressor’s structures were suddenly, without warning, and en masse taken out of occupied Yevpatoria, but they did not return to the Kherson region, in particular, to its Russian-occupied part.
As Professor Babin points out, local residents were involved in the “camps” as support “staff” in the fall, but they were strictly forbidden to exchange any contact information with the children.
During the removal of the children in December, the occupiers “told” this “personnel” that they were supposedly transporting them “to the Moscow region”, but, the expert adds, there is no information about the current whereabouts of these children in open sources for two weeks.
Our Association agrees that this issue requires an immediate and urgent response from both the Ukrainian authorities and international organizations, because extremely negative scenarios of the development of events are not excluded. In January 2023, the ARC notified a number of authorized UN structures about the relevant threatening situation.
