New Report: 35,000 Children Now Missing From Ukraine, Russia Forcibly Reeducating

Russia has abducted more than 35,000 Ukrainian children, reeducated them as Russians, and trained them for military service, international observers say.

Ukrainian government officials contend the Russian government is forcing at least some of the Ukrainian children to fight against Ukraine after they turn 18.

That’s possible but not currently verified, said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which tracks missing Ukrainian children in the current Russia-Ukraine war.

“We don’t have public evidence yet of the kids being put into combat. There are allegations from the Ukrainian government about that,” Raymond told the Register in a telephone interview Friday. “But the military training is well-established.”

The new figure of more than 35,000 children abducted outpaces Raymond’s estimate of at least 19,000 to 20,000 in December 2024, as the Register reported earlier this year.

Raymond told the Register the passage of time since late last year and improvements in gathering information account for the increased estimate. He said the figures are based on photographic evidence, including satellite imagery, as well as “large amounts of Russian documents in cyberspace.”

“They are taking the children as part of Russification that has been going on for 11 years,” Raymond said, referring to the 2014 Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea.

Russia subsequently invaded Ukraine in February 2022, sparking a war that is nearing three and half years.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, issued indictments of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova on charges of violating international law by transferring children from Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine to Russia.

Russian government officials deny the accusations of kidnapping minors, saying that they are rescuing Ukrainian children from combat areas on humanitarian grounds. They claim that the Ukrainian government is fabricating charges of kidnapping as anti-Russia propaganda.

The situation has drawn the attention of Pope Leo XIV, who on May 11 said of Ukraine during his first public Angelus: “May all prisoners be freed, and may the children be returned to their families.”

Some of the children taken to Russia have made it back to Ukraine, including a teenager interviewed recently on a podcast sponsored by The Times of London (“The General & the Journalist”), who said his mother was able to get him in Russia after traveling through several other countries to get there and after enduring six days of interrogation. He said he and his mother were forced to promise not to return to Ukraine, although they did.

During the EWTN Radio show Conversations With Consequences that aired July 19, Gary Marx, the host of the Peace & Power Ukraine podcast, said he spoke to kidnapped children who had made it back to Ukraine when he visited a rescue center in Kiev in December 2024, including a 16-year-old pregnant girl who said she had been raped by Russian soldiers.

“And she told us that she was going to choose life, and no matter what the sins were that were involved in that situation, she was going forward and having this child,” Marx said, “and she wanted that child to be the future of Ukraine.”