Fourteen-year-old Sasha from Mariupol in southeast Ukraine had tears in his eyes when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told his story during her State of the Union address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday.

He was only 11 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of his homeland in 2022. After the storming of Mariupol, Russian soldiers took him and his mother to a "filtration camp." Russia has set up such camps in the territories it occupies to subject Ukrainians to ideological screening before transferring them to Russia.

Sasha was separated from his mother in the camp and taken to occupied Donetsk. He was able to call his grandmother, Liudmila, who lives in an area under Ukrainian control. She brought Sasha back, but his mother's fate remains unknown.

Sasha and his grandmother were guests of honor during von der Leyen's speech, in which she emphasized that theirs was not an isolated case. Russia denies that Ukrainian children were abducted.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have abducted tens of thousands of children from their homes in occupied Ukrainian territories and either placed them in orphanages or handed them over to adoptive families in Russia.

The fate of these children became the focus of recent peace talks. The Ukrainian government has made the return of deported children to Ukraine a prerequisite for a possible ceasefire and a long-term peace deal.

However, Russia denies that the children were abducted and deported. In June, the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, claimed that Ukraine was "staging a show on the topic of lost children." He even said that Russian soldiers had "rescued" these Ukrainian children.

Mounting pressure on Russia over abducted children

In August, 38 countries, the Council of Europe and the European Union issued a joint statement demanding Russia return the children, provide information on their whereabouts and well-being and "cease to alter" their identity. US First Lady Melania Trump, wife of US President Donald Trump, wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterating the call, and US senators have made similar demands. 

The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported in August that it had taken months of lobbying for the repatriation of Ukrainian children from Russia to cross the Trump administration's radar. In April 2025, 40 faith leaders in the US appealed to Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to help return the children.

A bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators put forward a resolution in March calling for the return of the children and insisting that the US should provide support to Ukraine in this matter.

Conflicting numbers of Ukrainian children

The US Senate resolution from March spoke of at least 20,000 children, though the Ukrainian president's "Bring Kids Back" initiative mentions 19,546 children whose names are known. Verifying the figures is difficult because the Ukranian government keeps the list confidential.

"It's not only about the personal data of minors in need, but about their safety," Myroslava Kharchenko, a lawyer with the NGO Save Ukraine, which is strongly involved with the campaign to bring back repatriated children, told DW.

The Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that the list of 19,546 children is "fake." In a recent interview, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, said that the list was based on figures from reports of children with whom contact had been lost since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Even some members of the Bring Kids Back initiative unofficially have doubts about the list. "It's probably based partly on lists from boarding schools in the occupied territories and partly on research from open sources and social networks. Some of the children may have moved to Russia with their parents, and some of them have since moved to Europe," a representative of an international organization, who asked to remain anonymous, told DW.

Since children from the occupied territories have ended up in Russia in different ways, compiling a uniform list is challenging. The Ukrainian authorities recorded the first cases as early as 2014, when children from boarding schools in the self-proclaimed "People's Republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas were taken to Russian recreation camps.

In early February 2024, just before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the "People's Republics" called on the Kremlin to evacuate all orphanages. Around 500 children ended up in different parts of Russia.

They were followed by other minors, from Mariupol, for example. Like Sasha, some of them were separated from their parents in "filtration camps."

In early 2023, the Ukrainian government said that there were 4,390 Ukrainian children from special children's institutions in the territories under Russian control. It said that they were orphans and children deprived of parental care.

According to Kharchenko, roughly the same number of children were in family-like orphanages. She pointed out that, in legal terms, the Ukrainian state was responsible for these children.

Putin simplifies procedure for obtaining Russian citizenship

In May 2022, before he signed "accession treaties" and formalized the illegal annexation of four occupied regions of Ukraine in September of the same year, Putin simplified the procedure for obtaining Russian citizenship for orphans and children without parental care from these regions.

Consent from biological parents or legal guardians in Ukraine was no longer required. This exception was partly justified on humanitarian grounds, as Russian citizenship enabled access to social benefits, medical care and education. Lvova-Belova explained in an interview that Putin had ordered that Ukrainian children without legal guardians be placed in Russian foster families.

Journalists and researchers suspect that many more Ukrainian children were handed over to Russian families than is currently estimated. The Ukrainian government says this is a war crime and act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children. In April, the Council of Europe welcomed this decision.

Though Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and rejects all the allegations, it did react to the arrest warrants against Putin and Lvova-Belova. In 2023, Russia stopped transferring Ukrainian children en masse — at least officially. Instead, Lvova-Belova has said that Russia is promoting the return of children to Ukraine — but only on condition that they are personally handed over to blood relatives. That applies to parents, if they have regained custody, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. Kharchenko said that DNA tests were increasingly required.

Save Ukraine is currently helping to bring back between 60 and 70 children to Ukraine each month. Relatives first need to obtain custody under Ukrainian law and then travel to Russia, where they have to go through the same bureaucratic process again.

"Russian law is quite strict when it comes to the adoption of children by foreigners," Kharchenko explained. "And the deported children have all been granted Russian citizenship already."

According to Bring Kids Back, at least 1,600 children have been brought back to Ukraine in the last three years. Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Ukrainian NGO, the Regional Center for Human Rights, said that Ukrainian figures on deported children were incomplete.

"We only see numbers, without distinction according to age or gender. I can't say how many are already of legal age and ended up on Russian territory as a result of abduction or deportation," she recently told reporters.

Some international researchers have been more successful in their search for Ukrainian children. By March of this year, the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab had managed to track and identify 8,400 children abducted from Ukraine in Russia.

This article was originally published in Ukrainian.