Deported Ukrainian children taken to at least 210 facilities in Russia, investigation shows

Ukrainian children, forcefully deported by Moscow troops, have been taken to at least 210 facilities inside Russia and the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine since February 2022, the latest investigation reveals.

The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) team, which led the probe, said that the actual number is likely higher.

According to the latest findings, Russia is “operating a potentially unprecedented system of large-scale reeducation, military training, and dormitory facilities capable of holding tens of thousands of children from Ukraine for long periods of time.”

“This report demands action. Children are always the most vulnerable victims of armed conflict," Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak said.

"Not only have these children undergone trauma and displacement, they have also suffered systemic deportation, illegal adoption, and forced assimilation," he added.

“It’s now clear Russia plans to use Ukraine’s own children as a ‘weapon’ against us and Europe more broadly. This report provides irrefutable evidence contradicting Russian denials and misinformation about their handling of Ukraine’s children.”

Inside Russia's network of “re-education” and militarisation

The HRL investigation revealed the logistical and operational capacity committed to Russifying children taken from their home communities in Ukraine.

There are eight types of facilities HRL identifies in this study, ranging from summer camps and sanatoriums to a military base and, in one case, a monastery.

Children have been held at these locations for varying periods of time: some have gone temporarily and returned home, while other groups of children have been held indefinitely.

Ukrainian children placed into this Russian network of facilities include those taken from Ukraine’s state institutions and other institutions for caring for children without primary guardians and/or children with physical disabilities.

The HRL team says their investigation also includes children either forcibly separated from their parents in frontline areas since 2022 and children who were taken directly from their parents by Russia-aligned officials in the filtration camps established in and around Mariupol in early spring of 2022.

Where are Ukrainian children held in Russia?

The 210 locations which HRL has documented in this study constitute part of a network facilitating the transfer of Ukraine’s children spanning from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and Russia’s Black Sea regions across to the Pacific coast.

The locations include universities in city centres and remote camps in Siberia, according to the probe.

Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the HRL said: “We now know that the true scale of Russia’s network of facilities militarising, transferring, and re-educating children taken from Ukraine is massive.

At least 210 facilities, many of them under Russia’s direct control, hold Ukraine’s children from the Black Sea to Siberia and the Pacific Coast.”

Russia has been engaged in the deportation, “re-education”, militarisation and coerced fostering and adoption of children from Ukraine since at least 2014 in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea, and the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

HRL has confirmed that Russia’s government directly manages more than half of the locations identified in this report.

How many children have been forcefully taken to Russia?

Ukraine has been able to verify Russia’s deportation of over 19,500 children since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

These are the children for whom detailed information has been collected — their place of residence in Ukraine and their territorial location in Russia are known. 

But the actual number is likely to be much higher.

Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.

Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova claimed that Russia has “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023.

Ukraine managed to bring back 1,605 children, with each return mediated by a third-party state, notably by Qatar, South Africa and the Vatican.

During the direct talks in Istanbul in June, Ukraine handed over to Russia a list of its forcefully deported children.

Kyiv asked Moscow to return them to Ukraine, reiterating its commitment to bring the forcefully deported children back as one of the key aspects of a possible ceasefire and a peace deal in the long term.

The head of the Ukrainian delegation Rustem Umerov said, “If Russia is genuinely committed to a peace process, the return of at least half the children on this list is positive”.  

The Russian delegation chief Vladimir Medinsky showed the list, which contains the names of 339 abducted Ukrainian children.

The Kremlin representative accused Ukraine of "staging a show on the topic of lost children aimed at kind-hearted Europeans."  In his words, Kyiv is trying to "squeeze out a tear by raising this issue."

In March 2023 the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Lvova-Belova for their alleged actions and involvement in the unlawful deportation of children and the illegal transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.