There can be no peace with Russia until Ukrainian children come home, says advocate

A Ukrainian who has been working to repatriate children taken by Russia says there can be no peace between the two countries until all of them are home.

Russia has taken tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-occupied territories over the course of the war, an act that Ukraine says amounts to war crimes.

But it’s not clear whether the fate of those children came up during Tuesday’s high-profile phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which they reached a limited — and already faltering — ceasefire agreement. 

“We have to have stolen children as a part of peace negotiation,” Mykola Kuleba, founder of the charity Save Ukraine, which has been rescuing and repatriating Ukrainian children, told As It Happens host Nil Köksla. 

“We want, we ask, we beg the world: Help Ukraine bring our kids back.”

Trump has since promised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy he would help find the children, according to the White House. But that promise comes as his administration cuts funding to an organization tracking their whereabouts.

‘Death camps for Ukrainian identity’

Ukraine estimates Russia has taken 19,546 children from Ukraine since it invaded the country in February 2022, and only 1,243 have been returned home. 

Kuleba suspects the full number of missing children could be more than a million over the last decade of conflict between the two countries.

These children, he says, are forcibly separated from their families and put in orphanages, foster homes or adopted into Russian families.

Others, he says, are sent to “re-education camps” where they are taught pro-Russian propaganda and are forbidden from speaking their native language. 

“We call these death camps for Ukrainian identity,” he said. “It’s like ethnic cleansing for our kids.”

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Russia, meanwhile, characterizes the facilities as “summer camps” and says it is simply trying to evacuate and protect vulnerable children from the war zone.

But Kuleba says kids who spent time in those camps describe their Russian caregivers telling them their families and countries did not want them, and their only chance to have a successful future is to stay in Russia. 

“The main goal of Russia is to turn Ukrainian children into Russians,” he said. “And the second thing is to instill hatred towards Ukraine and then to turn them into Russian soldiers.”

Funding cuts hamper tracking efforts

The issue came up Tuesday during a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy, according to a press release issued by the White House.

“President Trump also asked President Zelenskyy about the children who had gone missing from Ukraine during the war, including the ones that had been abducted,” the statement reads. “President Trump promised to work closely with both parties to help make sure those children were returned home.”

But, at the same time, the Trump administration ended a government-funded initiative led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) that tracked the children. 

The organization issued a scathing report about the camps in December 2024, which included footage of Ukrainian teenagers in Russian camps engaging in weapons training.

“It’s really a very sad story,” Kuleba said. “Maybe the U.S. government will restart this program. We have no idea. As you, we received this information from the media and it’s hard to believe.”

A group of Democratic lawmakers has called on the administration to restore the Yale HRL program and impose sanctions to punish officials in Russia and its ally Belarus involved in moving the children.

“Our government is providing an essential service — one that does not require the transfer of weapons or cash to Ukraine — in pursuit of the noble goal of rescuing these children,” Democrats, led by Ohio Representative Greg Landsman, said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. 

“We must immediately, resume the work to help Ukraine bring these children home.”

The program was part of an effort that began under former U.S. president Joe Biden to document potential violations of international law and crimes against humanity by Russia and Russia-aligned forces in its invasion of Ukraine.

A spokeswoman for Eurojust, Europe’s agency for criminal co-operation, said on Tuesday it had been informed by Washington that it was ending its support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which was collecting evidence to prosecute Putin, among others.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said peace in the region can be achieved without the program, pointing to Trump’s talks with Putin and Zelenskyy. 

“The president of the most powerful country in the world, saying, I’m going to do something here… I think that’s a pretty good, clear indication that we can still work on issues that matter and make them happen without it being in a certain structure that has existed,” she said.

Kuleba, meanwhile, says he hopes other allies will step up and fill in the gaps left by the U.S. 

“We believe that maybe Canada joins efforts with other countries and will provide more support for us,” he said.