The Just Security Podcast

Russia’s Program of Coerced Adoption of Ukraine’s Children

• Just Security • Episode 91

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Among the many war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are large-scale efforts to deport Ukrainian children to Russia. Thousands of children have already been taken to Russian camps and facilities, leading the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for two senior Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, in March 2023. 

Despite the arrest warrants, the deportations have continued. A new report from the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab identified 314 individual Ukrainian children that Russian officials transferred from Ukraine to Russia for coerced adoption and fostering, acts that likely constitute grave violations of international law. 

What are the report’s key findings? And how might they contribute to efforts toward accountability, including potential new criminal charges against Russian officials? 

Joining the show to discuss the report are Oona Hathaway and Nathaniel Raymond. 

Oona is a Professor at Yale Law School and an Executive Editor at Just Security. Nathaniel is the Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab and a Lecturer in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. 

Show Notes:  

Paras Shah: Among the many war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are large-scale efforts to deport Ukrainian children to Russia. Thousands of children have already been taken to Russian camps and facilities, leading the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for two senior Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, in March 2023. 

Despite the arrest warrants, the deportations have continued. A new report from the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab identified 314 individual Ukrainian children that Russian officials transferred from Ukraine to Russia for coerced adoption and fostering, acts that likely constitute grave violations of international law.

What are the report’s key findings? And how might they contribute to efforts toward accountability, including possible new criminal charges against Russian officials? 

This is the Just Security Podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah. 

Joining the show to discuss the report are Oona Hathaway and Nathaniel Raymond. 

Oona is a Professor at Yale Law School and an Executive Editor at Just Security. Nathaniel is the Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab and a Lecturer in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. 

Nathaniel, Oona, thanks so much for joining the show and congratulations on publishing the report. Could you get started by giving us an overview of your key findings?

Nathaniel Raymond: I think the main finding is that the program of Russia's forced deportation of children from Ukraine is worse and more serious than we initially imagined. What this report shows is that at least 314 children that we've identified over the past 20 months have been entered into a pipeline of coerced fostering and adoption, that, in the case of 168, of them has ended up with these children from Donetsk and Luhansk being adopted by Russian families. And 20 percent of the children we identify have become citizens of Russia. And undergirding this entire program is really a set of legal maneuvers by President Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Child Rights Commissioner and the ostensible leader of the program that, as they were violating — and Oona can get obviously into more depth about this — as they were violating international law, they were trying to comply with Russia's domestic law, which required for a child to be fostered or adopted in Russia, that they had to be a Russian citizen.

And so that meant the Duma, working with the Kremlin and through Putin's presidential declarations, created a simplified pathway for these children to be able to have their citizenship renounced by proxy and bestowed with Russian citizenship, in some cases by officials within the Ministry of Education, including headmasters at boarding schools. And so, this entire program really relies on these three interconnected databases. And what we found was, based on a breakthrough by an investigator who realized that a photo they had seen of a Ukrainian child at a transfer location, standing in front of a teal in yellow wall, that they were looking at Russia's national adoption databases, and they saw a child who looked like a Russian child standing in front of the same-colored wall. And once the investigator realized that, they started to match — play like a game of memory between photos of the children in transport and photos of children in the database. And that really cracked the case, and that led us to understand that these children have gone to over 21 regions within Russia in a sophisticated logistical program that relied on planes, in some cases, a safe house, a midpoint location, and the funding of President Putin's office itself.

Paras: Wow. Thanks for that overview. And the report uses a trove of open-source information, including satellite images and Russian government documents. How did you gather the information, and what are the other sources that you rely on?

Nathaniel: Well, we gathered it very carefully. That's the first answer. It really was a game of cat and mouse, because, as we identified information, information would disappear. And so, it was particularly, as it related to open-source social media information from the alleged perpetrators, documenting their own alleged crimes. They basically became aware that certain pieces of information, particularly about visits to specific facilities, were probative for potential legal liability, and so, we saw that information disappear. We also saw profiles of the children change in different ways in the database as we were inside the database, and we were not the only ones who were looking at these databases. And so, it was a very difficult process, because we didn't know who else was looking at these sources, and we didn't know what their, basically, their operational security was, their trade craft, and we were worried that they were going to cause the whole database to crash. And so, that was one part of it. 

The other part, in terms of the satellite imagery, was about getting what we call “temporal-spatial mosaic effect,” which is in English, finding the time and place data from photographs, and then being able to see what satellite imagery had been collected and to start to build what's called a mosaic effect, which is using those photos of, say, kids being offloaded from a plane onto a bus, to see if we could validate that, triangulate that, with both retrospective and prospective imagery collection. And what was able to happen here is, we literally caught Putin's plane. And there's this one chilling image of these motor coach busses with these little black dots next to it. Now, we don't know for a fact whether those are the children, but it coincides with the planes, the location and the modality of transport by which these children were being moved. And so, it was really an exquisitely agonizing process of getting the information we could that was highly perishable and in danger from these databases, combining it with open-source information from social media that was disappearing, and then attempting to thread the needle together with satellite imagery, much of which we had no control over it being collected, because we were looking at the past.

Paras: Wow. Amazing work to triangulate all those different sources and pin all of that down. Oona, the report makes a number of legal conclusions based on the documented evidence, including that Russian officials likely committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. What are the relevant legal standards for making those determinations?

Oona Hathaway: Thanks for that, Paras. Yes, there's a section of the report that focuses on a legal analysis of all this information that has been unearthed by the researchers at Yale HRL that tries to assess, you know, what are the legal implications of these findings. We don't try to do the prosecutors’ work for them, but what we do is we go through and show that this evidence could be sufficient to establish both war crimes and crimes against humanity. The report itself — and our Just Security post summarizes this and goes through this in some detail, and then the report itself, of course, is more detailed — but we lay out why we think war crimes and crimes against humanity can be established. And we're really focused in large part on the Rome Statute, which is the law that creates the International Criminal Court, the treaty that creates International Criminal Court, because the International Criminal Court does have jurisdiction over crimes that are committed in the territory of Ukraine since 2014, because Ukraine has given jurisdiction to the court, initially through two declarations of acceptance of the jurisdiction of the court. And now, Ukraine is a party to the Rome Statute as well as of November. 

And so, in the report, what we do, we don't assess sort of individual liability, so we don't talk specifically about charges that might be brought against Putin or Lvova-Belova or the other officials involved. But we do assess the bulk of the evidence that could support individual charges of crimes against them and other Russian officials. And we walk through, as I said, the war crime of unlawful deportation or transfer, which, under the Rome Statute, entails the five elements that the perpetrator deported or transferred one or more persons to another state or to another location. As Nathaniel laid out, the report shows that these children were taken from Ukraine and transported to Russia, and details how they were, they have been put up for adoption and have been fostered across Russia. 

And then second, that these persons were protected under one or more of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Again, we show these children, because they are protected persons under the Geneva Conventions and were brought under control of one of the belligerents, were protected under the Geneva Conventions. There are the perpetrators aware of the factual circumstances that established their predicted status. I think that's pretty clear. And again, we go through the evidence that's provided for that. The conduct took place in the context of, it was associated with an international armed conflict. That international conflict, obviously, is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. And that the perpetrator was aware of the factual circumstances that established that armed conflict, which, again, we detailed that in some detail in the report. But I think most listeners will understand that that's pretty clear. 

So, the report shows that Russia's actions meet all five elements, and there's a lot of detailed evidence in the report and in the dossiers supporting the report that link particular Russian officials to each of those elements, and therefore establishes the basis for additional war crimes charges based on this information. And then in addition — and this is, I think, one of the key parts of the legal analysis of the report — we show that the evidence is provided in this report, and that is in the dossiers that support it, also we believe would support charges of crimes against humanity, which can be brought under the Rome Statute and have not yet been charged against Putin, Lvova-Belova or any of the Russian officials that have been involved in this. And I won't go through each of the elements, but listeners may be familiar with the crimes against humanity, but it's under the Rome Statute forced deportation as a crime against humanity when it's committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any of the civilian population with knowledge of the attack. And it's further defined as a forced displacement of people by expulsion or other course of acts from the area in which they're lawfully present without grounds permitted under international law. And in the report, we go through each of the elements established in the Rome Statute and show that the evidence that's provided by Yale HRL supports each of these elements, and therefore demonstrates that crimes against humanity have taken place. And we think this provides support for additional charges in the International Criminal Court against the Russian officials that are involved.

Paras: As you mentioned, the International Criminal Court may well bring new charges. At the same time, in parallel, Ukraine's own domestic judicial system is also prosecuting thousands of war crime and atrocity crimes charges. How might domestic Ukrainian prosecutors also use this evidence?

Oona: Yeah, I expect that they will use this evidence, and they can bring their own domestic charges in Ukraine's courts for war crimes and crimes against humanity based on this information. We were just on a call with the Ukrainian officials this morning, and this information is being transferred to Ukrainian prosecutors, who I think will be assessing whether to bring their own charges in domestic court against these officials. And I imagine there will be some coordination between Ukraine and the International Criminal Court on that. But these are, of course, crimes under Ukrainian law, although one thing worth noting is that prior to November, Ukraine did not actually have crimes against humanity as part of its domestic law. And when it became a party to the Rome. Statute just this past November — became the 125th state to ratify the Rome Statute — as part of that, it changed its own domestic law to create crimes against humanity as one of the crimes within its own domestic law. So, to the extent that the evidence here is documenting crimes that took place before Ukraine's own domestic law was changed, which was just in November, this past November, it would not be possible for them to bring those charges in domestic court. So, I think that at least against the top officials and for crimes against humanity, those are going to really probably have to be left to the International Criminal Court, but I would imagine that there will be additional war crimes charges against officials who are involved, particularly lower-level officials who've been involved in this program, and who can be identified based on the very detailed information that's provided in these 314 dossiers.  

Paras: And your post on Just Security also analyzes potential breaches of Russia's obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. And there are, of course, U.N. treaty bodies that monitor those conventions. How might they be able to also engage with potential breaches?

Oona: Yeah, I think this is an important point to note. We're very focused, of course, on criminal liability, and that is important. But Russia is also a party to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that Convention provides a broad set of protections for the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children, and it includes a number of provisions directing states to treat the best interests of the child as the primary consideration in all actions concerning the children, which we think that this report documents has not been met by the transfer of children, the coerced adoption and fostering of these children. Article Eight of the Convention also obligates states to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law, without unlawful interference. And Nathaniel could say more about this, but the evidence that was collected by the Yale HRL team is really pretty chilling in this respect, because not only were the children, their identity, their nationality been changed from Ukrainian to Russia, and specifically laws were passed to make it easier to give them Russian citizenship, but once they're adopted, their names and a lot of the basic identifying information that would allow their families to locate them can and likely will be changed, and that's clearly in direct contravention at the Convention on the Rights of the Child. So, these are really concerning issues, and I hope and expect that there will be some investigation by U.N. bodies who are responsible for overseeing human rights and particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

Nathaniel: You know, what is really important to understand is that there's no doubt about the critical elements of this case. The command and control is clear. This was a Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova operation from the get-go. And what is also clear is the network of associates that had to be involved to make this happen, particularly the so-called Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic officials who worked with Putin's political party, called United Russia, to create, basically, a system of identifying children for deportation and then for adoption and fostering and then supporting the physical logistics, but also the legal logistics to harmonize Donetsk’s and Luhansk’s domestic laws prior to the annexation with the Kremlin. And what's going to be very interesting here is that this is really the first time that the legal element of Donetsk and Luhansk involvement becomes clear, that I've seen. 

And so, what we also have is a new actor here, in terms of the Minister of Education, and the Ministry of Education itself, now really being identified as the critical action arm for day-to-day running of the facilities where the children were at in terms of midpoints before they were with families, and also the role of psychologists. And we have documents about the role of psychologists. It was the clearest — and I learned this word from Oona — mens rea. In terms of the mens rea, it was most clearly expressed by the Russians in that document that was sent to the psychologists, where it basically, to paraphrase from the Russian, it says, psychologists should be aware that the children are in distress after being forcibly moved from Ukraine. And so, it's this incredible moment where they say the quiet part out loud and so, I think, you know, the takeaway here on the factual elements, is that I don't think Russia realized how legible their actions were, because they were seeing it in little pieces. And we put those little pieces together, and what's clear is, once you put them together, you realize how much Russia was publicly contradicting the facts. Nice way of saying lying at critical junctures and how their stories about this program changed at various points reflective of the increased pressure from accountability mechanisms.  

So, one example, in October 2022, Lvova-Belova says they are not adopting kids. That very month, she was sanctioned by the United States government from the Department of Treasury, that she is saying that they are putting the children in the database. And as you go forward in time, following the International Criminal Court indictments in March 2023 and into South Africa's Supreme Court saying that they will arrest Putin if he goes to the BRICS summit last summer, you begin to see material then start disappearing from the internet that was probative to their direct command and control involvement in the program. And so, it's really, these two things come out of looking at the facts in the case. One, how deeply involved a multi-party command and control system was from the highest level, and minute aspects of this program. But the other thing is, how they were aware of their evolving liability, and they began to take actions to try to cauterize it. That's what really strikes me.

Paras: It really is so helpful when you put all those little pieces together and connect the dots into that bigger puzzle. What are efforts that other states can take here to support justice and accountability?

Oona: It's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is just continuing to provide support to the International Criminal Court, which is going to need all the support it can get. It's got a lot of investigations underway. These are expensive and difficult, and the court is under a lot of political pressure all the time, and so, continuing to provide support for the work that the court is doing is really, I think, quite critical. And supporting the court in a variety of ways, not just financially, not just in terms of providing public support for the court, for states that are not yet parties to become parties to the court, but also to continue to stand by the capacity of the court in the face of what is likely to be renewed challenges by Russia to the basic idea that there's even any accountability for its actions. Russia's position is that, because it's not a state party to the Rome Statute, it's not bound by the Rome Statute and isn't subject to the jurisdiction of the court. That flies in the face of the statute itself, but also basic principles of territorial jurisdiction. If you go into a country and you commit crimes on the territory of that country, and that country has accountability mechanisms, both domestic and through agreeing to the jurisdiction of International Criminal Court, you can't very well then say that you aren't subject to the jurisdiction of that court, but that's what Russia is trying to do here. 

And so, I think that you need states to really support the work of the court and the capacity of the court to, in fact, bring these charges. And of course, I'm concerned that the U.S. may change its position on the court with the change in administration. The U.S. has been quite supportive of the investigation of the court into crimes being committed by Russia and Ukraine. And of course, I worry that some of that support is going to evaporate, and I worry even more that, in fact, there might be attempts to sanction the court, as the Trump administration did the first time that Trump was president. So, I think there's going to be a need for real, united support for the court and the work that it does, and continued support for accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, that are committed during armed conflict, and particularly against the most innocent and sort of defenseless people, which is the children who are located in regions where conflict is taking place. 

Nathaniel: Can I hop in just with the war crimes investigator perspective here?

Paras: Yeah, please.

Nathaniel: Yeah, so, a few weeks ago, I was in Montreal at the ministerial meeting of countries supporting Ukraine and talking to foreign ministers and ambassadors at a session about data quality, information quality, about missing persons, not just children in Ukraine. And it made me feel very old, because I was going back in time to talk about Srebrenica, and so, when I was fresh out of college, the first investigation I supported in 1999 was the tail end of the identification operation between Physicians for Human Rights, who I worked for then, the International Commission for Missing Persons and the International Committee of the Red Cross. And I was reflecting in Montreal about how we are acting now, like, we are reinventing the wheel that we've never done in an investigation like this. And in many ways we haven't, but in many ways we have. 

And what was really clear in the case of Srebrenica, the international community really did things right in three big ways, which are missing now in terms of support for Ukraine. One was very specific scientific, forensic technical coordination in support to affected communities and governments. That was something that worked really well. The second is the multiyear big-ticket investments in data systems that, really, at the end of the day, is any prosecutor can tell you that if you don't have good data systems, you don't have a good case. And here, we're dealing with something more complex than 10,000 dead bodies. We're dealing with an unknown number of missing persons who are kids who are growing, and so the data challenges here, with or without DNA identification, are massive, really require multiyear investment. That hasn't happened in data system development, but also coordination. The third piece is understanding that in any missing persons investigation of this scale, and this is the largest missing persons investigation hands down, likely since World War Two, okay? Just to put that in perspective. So, in the case of 9/11, FBI and NYPD and New York coroners, medical examiners, were working 3,000 plus missing people in like 100 acres, okay? Here, we're talking at least as many as probably 20,000 missing kids that are still alive, over 3,500 miles between the Black Sea in the eastern Pacific, okay? 

And so regardless of the scale of the case, when you're doing a missing persons investigation during war, you're actually doing multiple things at once, okay? You're doing four big things. You're doing accountability, right? So, to bring charges, to bring perpetrators to justice. Second, you are doing a forensic mission on identification, separate from any accountability purpose. Third, you are doing a diplomatic and political mission, specifically in this case. But it does happen with dead bodies, with missing persons who are dead, where you're negotiating for either the living or negotiating for access to the dead and the status of the living or the dead. So, that's happening here in in very high relief. But the fourth and final thing, regardless of living or dead, you are doing a psychosocial humanitarian support mission. In the case of Bosnia, it was for the largely female survivors of the men and boys that were taken and killed. Here you're dealing with psychosocial support for those kids that come back — and some have come back, though not many — and also psychosocial support for those communities. That can include families, immediate families, extended families, and the communities for the children that were in these institutions when the war began, in many cases, require complex, long-term psychosocial support. 

And so, all four of those things are happening at once, right, and so, I really want people to understand here, when we talk about the legal issues involved. The human, technical and political dynamics here influence how and whether the law is provided, is applied appropriately, and really influences the international support roles that need to be played. And I think that this — I have never seen a case as complex as this one in 25 years of doing this work. It's the single most complex case I've ever seen. 

Paras: Wow. Complicated, and indeed it will need a lot of support from the international community and a range of different actors and types of support. Now that the report is out, I'm curious what the one or two biggest trends that each of you will be following in the next few weeks is? 

Oona: I can say a brief word, and then Nathaniel can speak to sort of the political fallout, but I can talk about the legal fallout. So, the legal fallout is likely to entail investigation and perhaps additional charges against Putin, Maria Lvova-Belova and other Russian officials in the International Criminal Court, both for war crimes and I would expect for crimes against humanity. The last time Yale HRL did a report, the arrest warrant was issued roughly a month after that report. And so, I think that there's a good chance that we'll see something very similar this time, that the underlying evidence that has been compiled as part of the creation of this report has been transferred to prosecutors, and I would expect that they are going to move forward on that and that we will see some action from the court in the next several weeks to maybe a month or two.

There will, course, also be some domestic prosecutions that will unfold from this. So, there will be significant legal ramifications that are going to follow from this report. And I think it's also meant to send a message to others who are involved in in armed conflict, that deportation, transfer of children is something for which others are going to be held accountable. So, the hope is that not only is this going to provide accountability for the children who've been transferred, but that it reinforces the prohibition on transfer and deportation of children, and particularly the forced adoption and change of identity that that is documented in great detail here.

Nathaniel: Yeah, what I'm going to be watching is to find out what Oona’s watching so I can learn and understand. But what I'm going to be really trying to see here is whether the political sands are shifting underneath Putin about Russia finally having to give up the list. And what it was supposed to do at the beginning is to register these children with the central tracing agency, with the International Committee of the Red Cross. That hasn't happened. And so, my, you know, my eyes are going to be glued on whether there's movement in terms of Russia, even in a halfhearted and performative way, trying to signal that it's open to some form of accounting, right? And without having the political support for a pressure campaign to get Russia to do this basic accounting, the kids are never coming home, right? And so, you know, my dials on my dashboard here are really around whether we're seeing, on one hand, Russia feeling heat where they have to start giving up names. And then, whether there is coalescence amongst not just the Western allies, you know, the usual suspects, but really the Global South, okay? So, the people to watch are Brazil, South Africa, India, those within BRICS, those in the nonaligned community, whether they respond to this and say, okay, we may not have put sanctions on you yet, but this is over the line, okay? And you've either got to give up the names or there's going to be consequences. That's what I'm going to be watching.

Paras: Nathaniel, this week, you'll be briefing the U.N. Security Council along with U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield. What are you going to say? 

Nathaniel: I'm going to deliver two messages to everyone around the table at the Council who’s not Russia. I'm going to say we have a lot of big issues in front of us right now affecting kids in war, from Gaza to Sudan. But this issue is unique, and we need to see it as uniquely important, because if we don't act here to hold Russia to account and to force Russia to bring these kids home, then we're eroding the legal norm of special protected status for children during war. And so, this is not just about the Ukrainian kids. It's about all kids in the future of war. And so, we don't act now, and we are complicit in eroding special protected status, which has been the result of decades of evolving jurisprudence, okay? 

The second thing I'm going to say is to Russia. The law was clear. You're going to say that you were doing a medical evacuation. You were doing an evacuation to keep these kids safe from war. But the Geneva Conventions gives you an operator's manual for what you should have done on day one. So, let's walk through that, because if you're not going to do that, then I want to direct your attention to the eighth Nuremberg trial, the RuSHA trial of Nazi and Nazi-aligned officials for the Germanification of Polish children. Let's look at that, because that's what we're talking about here. And so, you've got door one, which is, let's do a list. Let's get these kids home. Door two, however, points towards Nuremberg.

Paras: It's a very effective message. Thank you again to both of you for joining the show, and we're so privileged to be able to highlight the report and your analysis at Just Security. We'll be tracking all of this. Thank you again.

Oona: Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for the opportunity to write about this important report and share it with the Just Security readers and for the opportunity to talk with you today about what we found and the legal implications of it. 

Nathaniel: Grim topic, great conversation. Thank you.

Paras: This episode was hosted and produced by me, Paras Shah, with help from Clara Apt.  

Special thanks to Oona Hathaway and Nathaniel Raymond.

You can read all of Just Security’s coverage of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the International Criminal Court, and international law, including Oona’s analysis, on our website.  

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

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