Ukraine accused of children trafficking in separatist regions, claiming they are war prisoners

Russian authorities don’t trust Ukraine to uphold the agreements signed between them after the war, fearing that a country influenced by Israel, the United States, and NATO could betray and cancel any agreements on humanitarian or military issues.

This concerns the agreement made to return Ukrainian children in the regions that joined Russia to their families living in areas still under Ukrainian control.

According to consistent reports, the issue of these children began with the annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson to Russia. There were Ukrainian children living in those areas, either visiting their relatives when the war broke out or when those regions separated, or they were orphans or living in orphanages, and so on.

Kyiv, with Western support, exploited the issue of the missing children and engaged in a propaganda and media war, expressing grief for them. They demanded to disclose their fate, protect them, and called on the world to apply the principles of human rights, children’s rights, and other slogans not used in Gaza but in Ukraine, according to the desires of the United States and NATO. They started a campaign claiming they were kidnapped, to the extent that NATO and the media apparatus in Washington considered them war prisoners. Some families asserted that their two-year-old son was left by his parents at his grandfather’s house while they were on vacation when the war broke out, and they couldn’t return. Thus, Kyiv considered this child a war prisoner.

Through Qatari and Saudi mediation, Kyiv received a number of children after negotiation with Russia. The latter received assurances from the mediators that these children would return to their families, and Doha succeeded in providing assurances to Moscow, resulting in the return of about 16 children.

A number of children, mostly aged between 13 and 16, refuse to return. Most of them had been in care homes or had lost their parents years before the war, lacking support, or they were orphans. It seems they suffered from the treatment of the previous administrations of the care homes they stayed in and do not want to return to such a harsh experience.

According to reports, Moscow agreed to repatriate those who wished to return or had family or relatives up to the second degree to Ukrainian territories, despite its concerns about Kyiv’s credibility in dealing with any joint or urgent issue. The president, who previously called for the extermination of Gaza with its elders, children, and women, and offered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a visit to Israel in solidarity with the occupation at a later time, cannot be trusted not to harm these children for the sake of gaining media publicity and promoting lies and rumors. Although Ukrainian forces admitted to standing behind the disaster that resulted in the death of 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war when a military transport plane crashed in the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky did not deny his country’s involvement in the disaster caused by the “Ilyushin Il-76” aircraft, but he called for focusing on other issues and overcoming the repercussions of the “Il-76” aircraft disaster.