They are not lost. They are not forgotten
Source: Save Ukraine & War Child UK
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their homes and transferred deep into Russia. The Ukrainian Government in March 2023 confirmed 19,546 cases, but this figure is a significant understatement. Data from Yale University published in June 2025 pushes this figure up to 35,000. Other estimates put the figure even higher. In July 2023, the US Government estimated that around 260,000 children were transferred, though likely most of these were with their families. It is important to emphasise these children were not lost; they were stolen. For the over one million children that remain in temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine (TOT), the situation has also been dire. What started with a ban on speaking their own language and rewritten school curricula has turned into a state-sponsored campaign of indoctrination and militarisation, that has seen children given military training and issued draft papers for the Russian military. This report provides striking evidence of how Russian authorities are employing a multi-layered system of control to create a generation of children stripped of their identity and moulded to serve an authoritarian state.
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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their homes and transferred deep into Russia. The Ukrainian Government in March 2023 confirmed 19,546 cases, but this figure is a significant understatement. Data from Yale University published in June 2025 pushes this figure up to 35,000. Other estimates put the figure even higher. In July 2023, the US Government estimated that around 260,000 children were transferred, though likely most of these were with their families. It is important to emphasise these children were not lost; they were stolen. For the over one million children that remain in temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine (TOT), the situation has also been dire. What started with a ban on speaking their own language and rewritten school curricula has turned into a state-sponsored campaign of indoctrination and militarisation, that has seen children given military training and issued draft papers for the Russian military. This report provides striking evidence of how Russian authorities are employing a multi-layered system of control to create a generation of children stripped of their identity and moulded to serve an authoritarian state.
View the document ➚