Another Ukrainian Child Forcibly Taken To Belarus After Being Wounded
5- 5.12.2023, 9:44
- 7,352
New evidence of the crimes of the Lukashenka regime.
The Russian military took Ukrainian children out of the Kyiv region during its occupation in the spring of 2022. One boy was wounded and taken to Belarus with his grandmother. This fact became known during the consideration of the Ukrainian court case on the adoption of a minor child, reports Radio Svaboda.
According to the case file, the boy's parents died in March 2022 when the Russian military shelled the car in which the family was trying to leave the war zone. This happened near the village of Zdvizhivka in the Kyiv region. The boy suffered a shrapnel wound to the brain and lost sight in his right eye.
The Russians took the wounded child and his grandmother to Belarus.
Their return was fought for by the boy's uncle, who did everything he could to involve diplomats, public and medical organisations in the process. He soon managed to get his mother and nephew from Belarus to Poland and from there to Germany, where the boy received the treatment he needed.
They now live in the Buchanskiy district of the Kyiv region. Further details of the case are not known. The family, which has three children of its own, has filed papers to adopt the boy.
During the fighting for Kyiv in February-March 2022, it was in the area of Zdvizhivka that the Russians established the largest rear military base in the Kyiv region. Journalists found out that the headquarters of the 98th Division from Ivanovo and units of the Rosgvardiya from the Siberian district were stationed here. In July 2022, a court case also revealed the forcible transfer of a Ukrainian teenager from the Vyshgorod district of the Kyiv region to Belarus by the Russian military.
He and his brother were taken away in a bus with bags on their heads and their hands tied. After being checked at the border, Belarusian border guards separated the brothers - the younger one was sent to a boarding school in Mazyr.
Later, the teenager was told that he would be transferred to an orphanage - a special education centre in Mazyr. However, the director of this institution contacted the Red Cross to find the boy's parents or relatives. They were found and the boy returned home late on the evening of 22 April. The fate of his older brother is unknown.
Belarusian authorities accused of exporting Ukrainian children
Experts from Yale University recently published a study claiming that more than 2,400 Ukrainian children between the ages of 6 and 17 were taken to 13 institutions in Belarus after the Russian invasion began.
The authors claim that this process was personally approved by Aliaksandr Lukashenka, coordinated between the Russian and Belarusian authorities, and that the Ukrainian children received military training and re-education on the territory of Belarus.
On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Ombudsperson for Children's Rights. They are allegedly responsible for the war crime of the illegal deportation of children and their illegal transfer from the occupied territories of Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation. On 27 April this year, PACE adopted a resolution recognising the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia as genocide and Aliaksandr Lukashenka and the Belarusian government as complicit in it.