Ukrainian children abducted to Russia remembered here in Idaho

First published in the Idaho Capital Sun April 15, 2025.

Of all the issues surrounding the Ukraine-Russia conflict, one really stands out for me—the thousands of children who have been abducted by Russian troops and sent to re-education camps and adoptive families all over Russia. There are currently 19,546 cases on file of abducted children. These children are being forcibly held in Russia and they are not able to contact their families back in Ukraine.

I was in Washington, DC at the Ukraine Action Summit (April 6-9, 2025) as part of the Idaho Delegation, along with Lena and Scott Contor and Eric Medina.  All fifty states were represented at the summit and over 600 individuals attended. Attendees were Ukrainians by birth, by ancestry and by choice; I’m one of the latter.

At its core, the purpose of the summit was informational and the information coming out of some of the best universities in the US points to a huge number of Ukrainian children who have been caught up in this conflict. According to the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab,  “The February 2023 report found that more than 6,000 children between the ages of four months and 17 years had been transported to 43 Russian-operated camps and facilities since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.”  Recent updates, using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data triangulated with social media posts and other open source information show that the abductions are continuing; a small percentage of the children have been located and returned while many others continue to disappear.

Ukrainian children are held in several different situations after being abducted by Russian soldiers according to Nathaniel Raymond of the Yale School of Public Health. They are held in re-education camps, they are taken from orphanages where many are temporarily being lodged even though they have family, they are taken directly off the battlefields by Russian soldiers and they are split apart from their families while in detention centers. Under the Geneva Convention, children in this situation must be registered with the Red Cross, they need to be allowed to call home to let their families know how they are doing, and they need to be taken to a neutral country and out of harms way until they can be reunited. None of these conditions of safety are currently being met.

According to the organization Bring Kids Back, under the direction of the President of the Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, there are currently 19, 546 children who have been abducted; only 1269 of those have been returned to their Ukrainian families. International humanitarian law defines these acts of abduction as kidnapping, the children must be returned without conditions. They are not pawns.

In Idaho, our communities have been welcoming and supportive of Ukrainians coming to the US from this war.  We have had fundraisers for Ukrainian refugees and for general support to those Ukrainians living in combat zone. In addition to the daily dangers and horrors of war, thousands of Ukrainian families are experiencing the terrible nightmare of not knowing where their children are amidst the on-going violence. Child abduction is another facet of a conflict that needs to be resolved by securing a permanent peace treaty between Ukraine and Russia.