President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 30 September that he had a telephone conversation with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, during which, among other things, they discussed the return to Ukraine of children abducted by Russia and the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant occupied by Russian troops.
“We discussed the summit of the international coalition For the Return of Ukrainian Children and the resolution that Ukraine is preparing for the General Assembly. We expect that the world will support the need to return all Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. We will present the draft resolution already this year. We are working with countries to ensure support,” Zelensky wrote in a telegram.
“We also discussed the situation at the ZNPP, which is occupied by the Russians. There now the longest blackout-seventh day the station is cut off from power, power grids are broken due to shelling. It is important that the world knows what the consequences could be. We count on an appropriate response,” he added.
According to Zelensky, during the conversation with Guterres they also talked about the situation in the Gaza Strip and US President Donald Trump’s peace initiative. “This is a strong initiative and we are ready to make our contribution to make the peace proposals work,” the president said.
On 23 September, at a meeting of the international coalition For the Return of Ukrainian Children in New York, Zelensky said that the children deported by Russia from Ukraine are victims of a “double crime”: “first (Russia – ed.) kidnapped and deported them, and now it is trying to steal everything they have inside: their culture, character, their ties with their families and identity.”
Zelensky called it fair and symbolic that the first charge for which the International Criminal Court issued a warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin concerned offences against children.
According to him, thanks to the Bring Kids Back UA initiative and the support of partners, 1,625 Ukrainian children have already been returned to Ukraine.
According to Ukraine’s official data, more than 20,000 Ukrainian children ended up in Russia and the occupied territories during the full-scale war. At the same time, the Verkhovna Rada commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, suggested that Russia had illegally exported about 150,000 children from Ukraine, while the Ukrainian parliamentary commissioner for children’s rights, Darya Herasymchuk, put the figure at “several hundred thousand children, i.e. somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000”.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian children’s ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of committing war crimes – forced deportations and displacement of the population, particularly children, from the occupied territories of Ukraine.
Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova said in July 2023 that Russia had “taken in” about 4.8 million residents of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, of whom more than 700,000 were children. According to her, most Ukrainian children allegedly came to Russia with their parents or other relatives.