As of July 28, 564 children have been killed and more than 1,487 wounded to various degrees of severity as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Most children were killed or injured in the eastern Donetsk and Kharkiv oblasts, where the fighting has been some of the heaviest of the war, with 567 and 407 cases documented by the Ukrainian authorities in each oblast respectively.
In an interview on June 4, Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin said that "we still don't know the true scale of the crimes committed in the occupied territories, to which we do not have access."
In addition to the children killed or injured by Russia’s war and occupation of Ukraine, over 19,500 children have been confirmed as abducted by Moscow since the start of its full-scale invasion, and nearly 800 of them have been brought back home, according to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.
From the occupied parts of Kherson Oblast alone, Russians took 1,000 children to the Russian region of Kabardino-Balkaria for "rehabilitation,” said Ukraine’s Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets on July 28.
In a statement he said that “children are forced to adopt not only the culture and traditions of the enemy state. Powerful resources are involved to destroy their Ukrainian identity, which in turn is a component of the genocidal policy of the Russian Federation.”
The transfer of children and erasure of their Ukrainian identity in Russia's systematic re-education and militarization efforts could constitute genocidal intent, although experts agree that it could be more difficult to prove in the international court than the lesser charge of war crimes.
The genocidal nature of Russia's aggression toward Ukraine has manifested in war crimes and indiscriminate violence directed at Ukrainian civilians, but also in the denial and distortion of history, attempts to erase Ukrainian culture, and the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.
Since the outbreak of Russia's full-scale war, the NATO and OSCE Parliamentary Assemblies have recognized acts committed by Russian invading forces as genocide.
European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders told Deutsche Welle last April that a special tribunal for Russia's war in Ukraine may be created by the end of the year.
He empathized that "the next step is a matter of political will.”
