Advisor – Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights and Child Rehabilitation Daria Herasymchuk took part online in the panel discussion The Impact of Russia’s War of Aggression on Ukraine’s Children, organized by the Group of Friends on Children and Armed Conflict at the OSCE and the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the OSCE.
The event was held in Vienna on the occasion of the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression.
“Ukraine has information on at least 19,546 cases of the illegal deportation or forced transfer of Ukrainian children. However, more than 1.6 million children remain under occupation or may have been unlawfully taken to the Russian Federation,” Daria Herasymchuk noted.
She spoke about Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian children, and all the steps Ukraine is taking to bring them home, including President Zelenskyy’s Bring Kids Back UA initiative.
The discussion also addressed the use of international mechanisms – in particular the OSCE Moscow Mechanism and the UN’s Children and Armed Conflict agenda – to continue documenting war crimes against children, collecting evidence, and transferring it to international courts in the future.