Kyiv has claimed that thousands of Ukrainian children have been “kidnapped” by Vladimir Putin’s forces and taken to Russia.
The US Embassy in Kyiv accused Russia of kidnapping Ukrainians and forcibly sending them to Russia. Citing Ukraine’s foreign ministry, the embassy said Russian forces illegally removed children.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that 2,389 children had been transported across the border from the eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The US embassy in Kyiv tweeted: “This is not assistance. It is kidnapping,” citing the ministry. The ministry called it a “gross violation of international law.”
The shocking claim about the youngsters follows an earlier claim from the authorities in the besieged city of Mariupol that several thousand of its residents had been forcibly deported to Russia.
The scenes are said to be horribly similar to how people were transported across Europe before and during the Second World War. On Monday, Ukraine accused Russia of forcing Ukrainians in the besieged city of Mariupol into Russia, Insider previously reported.
Britain said it would urge NATO later this week to step up supplies of weapons to Ukraine, while Moscow said it would only use nuclear weapons if “its very existence was threatened”. As a result of the fierce Ukrainian resistance, Russia is thought to have lost thousands of troops.
Although the Kremlin has only confirmed the deaths of 498 personnel in the war so far, the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article on Monday suggesting that 9,861 Russian servicemen had been killed and another 16,153 injured.
According to the United Nations, thousands of civilians have also been killed, and the invasion has driven more than 10 million people from their homes, almost a quarter of Ukraine’s population.
More than 3.5 million people have now fled the country, and more than 2 million have crossed the Polish border, the largest flow of refugees in Europe since the Second World War has left countries struggling to cope as they try to provide accommodation and vital services such as education.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human-rights spokesperson, also alleged that Ukrainians were being “sent by rail to various economically depressed cities in Russia.”
Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol Mayor, also compared the removals to the work of the Nazis during World War II. Mayor Boicheko said: “What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II when the Nazis forcibly captured people.”
Reports of the forced removals have not been independently verified, the Russian state news agency TASS reported that millions were asking to be moved into Russia.
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