Bringing Back Children Back Home: The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab’s view on a “Rogue Camp” for Children in Ukraine

“The fact that these are transfers and deportations of children is unconscionable by any standard,” the note said. Russia must stop forced transfers and return children to their parents or legal guardians immediately. Russia must provide registration lists of Ukraine’s relocated and deported children and grant access for outside independent observers to related facilities within Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine and inside Russia itself.”

“This is not one rogue camp, this is not one rogue mayor or governor,” says Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. “It is a massive logistical undertaking that does not happen by accident.”

“The Russian government needs to make everything seem normal, because you can’t move them through these many places without their movements being noticed,” she says.

He says that in certain cases, there is adoption, other cases are summer camp programs where kids were supposed to go back home but never did, and in some cases are re-education camps.

The Yale report is the most extensive look at the program so far, says Raymond. He adds, “It shows chain of command and it shows logistical complexity.”

The First Russian Social Media Posts: How Russian Missing Children in Ukraine Meteorized as Hurochka and Luhansk Learned to Smile

“By the end of the week, one hundred and eight orphans of Donbass who have received Russian citizenship will have parents,” Lvova-Belova wrote in a typical post on her Telegram channel last July, using the Russian spelling for Ukraine’s Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk) regions. “Shurochka was the first to be handed over to her mother. I could not keep my tears out when I heard the happy child laugh.

The Ukrainian government and U.N. senior human rights officials have consistently raised the alarm over these activities since the early days of the war.

The first Russian social media posts appeared a year ago, prompting the researchers from Yale to start researching missing children from other countries. The Yale researchers say that the messaging began at the time of Putin’s adoption announcement. He asked not to be named to protect the security of his work from hackers.

“I believe the first places we saw this were on Telegram and then VK,” he says. Telegram is popular in Russia. VK is the Russian version of Facebook.

The future of war crimes investigations depends on how open source research techniques are combined with high-resolution satellite imagery.

There are about 20 researchers who scour social media posts, news reports, government announcements and Russian messaging services, looking for patterns and connections that otherwise might go unnoticed.

The Yale Lab: Investigating Russian War Crimes with Digital Evidence, FBI Detections, and the Internet’s Cyber Cop Shop (Cyber Cop Shop)

“The primary purpose of the camps appears to be political reeducation,” he said, noting that at least 32 of the facilities identified in the report “appear to be engaged in systematic re-education efforts that expose children from Ukraine to Russia-centric academic, cultural, patriotic, and in two cases, specifically military education.”

“This operation is centrally coordinated by Russia’s federal government and involved every level of government,” according to the report. Several dozen federal, regional, and local figures were identified as being directly engaged and politically justifying the program.

The Yale team are all young Internet sleuths who work to verify the data they dig up and document the steps needed to meet the exacting standards and protocols for trial.

Raymond describes the lab’s role as a “cop shop” – a “cyber cop shop,” that is mindful to detail a chain of custody for the evidence produced. He shows the TV show Law and Order as a way to understand the Lab’s role.

He says they collect evidence, digital evidence and then how that does not conform to the law as the Jerry Orbach beat cop side.

“We are showing that we can collect perishable evidence and make it actionable in ways that were previously impossible. Governments used to only be able to offer this scale of operation.

At the Yale Lab, war crimes investigations are happening at a scale similar to the governments, says Raymond, as civil society uses the same tools.

The evidence shows the Kremlin’s attempts to suppress and deny Ukraine’s identity, history, and culture. “The devastating impacts of Putin’s war on Ukraine’s children will be felt for generations. The United States will stand with Ukraine and pursue accountability for Russia’s appalling abuses for as long as it takes.”

It found 43 facilities that stretch from one end of Russia to the next, including Russian-occupied Crimea and the eastern Pacific Coast.

The researchers have not seen evidence of children being sent into conflict because the camps appear to be training children in the use of firearms and military vehicles.

The report found that “many children taken to camps are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled,” but noted that “in many cases, the ability of parents to provide meaningful consent may be considered doubtful, as the conditions of war and implicit threat from occupying forces represent conditions of duress.”

The lack of contact between the child and their parents is causing harm on a daily basis, and it is critically important to know that.

The report said it had identified many federal, regional, and local figures who were indirectly engaged in operating and justifying the program and at least a dozen of them are not on U.S. and/or international sanctions lists.

Raymond noted that “we are not here today making the genocide conclusion, but we are saying that this system is consistent with the statutory basis in both the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention in terms of the prohibition on transferring children from one group to another.”

Ned Price said that Russia’s forced relocation, reeducation and adoption of Ukrainian children is an important part of the Kremlin’s systematic efforts to deny and suppressUkraine’s identity.

The Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians, which the US State Department deems to be a war crime, forbids the transfer and deportation of protected persons.

The Children’s Liberation Camp: a new camp for children in the Donbass of Ukraine, inaugurated by the President Vladimir Putin in 2021

Lvova-Belova, who was appointed to be President Vladimir Putin’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights in 2021, created her Telegram channel days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s organization, has said that “adoption should never occur during or immediately after emergencies,” and that during upheaval, children separated from their parents cannot be assumed to be orphans. The UN furthermore considers forcibly transferring another country’s population within or beyond its borders to be a war crime.

She wrote that she was crossing the threshold with apprehension, as she wanted to know how they settled into their new surroundings and relations with their parents and other children in the family. All doubts were forgotten in the first few minutes. The family is wonderful.

“For me, this is yet another confirmation that the work that we have done on the placement of orphans from Donbass is not in vain. Everything was done according to plan.

The British have drawn attention to their mission of helping children in the Donbass. As of now, our friendship is with those affected by sanctions, as we enjoy it as families and organizations.

Lvova-Belova started out her career as a children’s guitar teacher. She worked her way up through the Russian power structure and became involved in local politics.

In a tearful television news report posted to her Telegram channel in November, Lvova-Belova recalled adopting a teenage boy from Mariupol, who said that he had been put on the streets by the guardians who took him in after his mother died of cancer.

She said last August that Ukrainian children are in for an “extraordinary camp season” due to idyllic photos by the Black Sea.

Teenagers can find out their life plans and professional guidelines in the nine workshops at the camp. We are looking forward to the opening of the camp.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/15/europe/russia-ukraine-children-maria-lvova-belova-intl/index.html

Russian Ambassador Vladimir Putin meets Maria Lvova-Belova in a Russian government scheme to train, educate, or forcefully adopt out Ukrainian children

The embassy went on to accuse Washington, which has provided military aid to Ukrainian armed forces, of being complicit in the alleged deaths of children in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met Thursday with Maria Lvova-Belova, the official at the center of an alleged Russian government scheme to relocate, reeducate, and sometimes militarily train or forcibly adopt out Ukrainian children.

Putin said that the amount of work had been done for a long time in the video that the Kremlin released. “The number of applications from our citizens regarding the adoption of children from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions is also growing. The (Commissioner’s) Institute has been dealing with this issue for a long time, for almost nine years now.”