FT Investigation: Ukrainian Children Featured on Russian Adoption Sites
2024In June 2024, an investigation from the Financial Times revealed that four missing Ukrainian children had been identified and located in Russia – they had been abducted and taken to Russia in the early month’s of Russian’s invasionof Ukraine in 2022.
The FT employed image recognition tools, public records and interviews with Ukrainian officials and the children’s relatives to find the children, who were eventually found by the FT on a Russian government-linked adoption website, in one case a child appeared under a false Russian identity. In tracking the children, the FT were aided by the state body, Ukrainian Child Rights Protection Centre. The FT had compared photographs of the children from an official database of missing Ukrainian children with the public profiles of children up for adoption in Russia using image recognition tools. The FT said:
“Reporters reviewed potential matches manually to select those likely to be a true match. The false names and ages the children had been given meant it would have been challenging to find them in other ways.
“High probability matches were shared with the CRPC, which contacted the children’s relatives and guardians to confirm each missing Ukrainian child.”
The findings from the FT’s journalism contributed to the growing evidence indicating potential war crimes and crimes against humanity by Russia, alleged by the International Criminal Court, Ukrainian government officials, and legal experts.
The FT reports: “The children were abducted from state care homes and separated from their guardians and relatives in towns across the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine that fell under the control of Russia’s invading army in 2022. They range in age from eight to 15-years-old.”
The FT also reported that the ICC have since issued arrest warrants for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the Children’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, saying that “they bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of the children.”
The office of Ukraine’s human rights commissioner and the CRPC are attempting to confirm the identities of dozens more Ukrainian children taken to Russia who were flagged to them by the FT.
