Russia's Deportation of Ukrainian Children and the ICC Warrant for Putin

Of all the crimes alleged in Russia's war against Ukraine, from the bombing of cities to the killings in Bucha, the International Criminal Court chose to begin with children. On March 17, 2023, judges in The Hague issued arrest warrants for two people: Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, and Maria Lvova-Belova, his Commissioner for Children's Rights. The charge in both cases was the same, the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. It was only the third time the court had issued a warrant for a sitting head of state. The choice surprised people, but it reflected something the prosecutors understood well. Bombing cases are argued over targets and proportionality. The movement of children is documented in Russia's own announcements, in official decrees and in televised ceremonies. Lvova-Belova herself had spoken publicly about adopting a teenage boy from the occupied city of Mariupol. The evidence, in part, had been broadcast by the accused.

In short: International humanitarian law forbids an occupying power from deporting or forcibly transferring people out of occupied territory and from changing the status or nationality of children in its control. The ICC has charged Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova with the war crime of unlawfully deporting and transferring Ukrainian children to Russia; Ukrainian authorities say the children taken number in the thousands, and only a fraction have come home.

What the court charged

The warrants accuse Putin and Lvova-Belova of the war crimes of unlawful deportation of population (children) and unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, from at least February 24, 2022, the start of the full-scale invasion. The court said there were reasonable grounds to believe Putin bore individual criminal responsibility both for committing the acts directly, jointly with others or through others, and for failing to exercise proper control over the civilian and military subordinates who did.

The warrants were initially kept under seal. The judges decided to announce them publicly, they said, because the conduct was allegedly ongoing and public awareness might help prevent further crimes.

Russia is not a member of the court and rejected the warrants as legally void. It later opened its own criminal cases against the ICC prosecutor and several judges. Ukraine was not a member of the court in 2023 either, but it had accepted the court's jurisdiction over crimes on its territory through declarations in 2014 and 2015, which is how the court could act. Ukraine became a full member of the Rome Statute on January 1, 2025.

The numbers, and why they are hard

How many children are we talking about? Ukrainian authorities have said that nearly twenty thousand Ukrainian children have been deported or forcibly displaced to Russia or Russian-occupied territory, and maintain a registry of named cases. Russia, for its part, has spoken of much larger numbers of children it says it has "evacuated" from war zones, a figure that includes children who traveled with their families.

The categories matter. Some children were in orphanages or state institutions in occupied areas when Russian forces arrived. Some were separated from their parents at filtration checkpoints, or while a parent was detained. Some were sent to so-called recreation camps in Russia or in Crimea, ostensibly for a few weeks, and then not returned. Researchers at Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab, working with the US State Department's Conflict Observatory, reported in early 2023 that they had identified thousands of Ukrainian children held in a network of dozens of facilities in Russia and occupied Crimea, many of them devoted to what the researchers described as political re-education.

No one has a complete count, and it is wise to treat any precise number cautiously. What is not in doubt is that a systematic programme existed, that it was run by Russian state bodies, and that it was publicized as an act of rescue.

What the law says about children in war

The rules here are clearer than most.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians in occupied territory, says in Article 49 that individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or of any other country, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. An occupier may evacuate an area if the safety of the population or imperative military reasons demand it, but evacuees must be returned to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area have ended, and evacuation should not take people outside the occupied territory except where that is impossible to avoid.

Article 50 adds protections specific to children. An occupying power must facilitate the proper working of institutions devoted to children's care and education, must take steps to identify children and register their parentage, and may not change their personal status. Additional Protocol I of 1977, which the Soviet Union ratified in 1989 and which still binds Russia, goes further on evacuation. Article 78 says no party may arrange the evacuation of children, other than its own nationals, to a foreign country, except for a temporary evacuation where compelling reasons of the children's health, medical treatment or safety require it, and then with the written consent of parents or guardians where they can be found. The Protocol also requires detailed records so that children can be returned.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Russia is a party, protects every child's right to preserve their identity, including nationality, name and family relations.

Measured against these rules, the key facts are not complicated. Russia took children out of occupied Ukraine, into Russia, in large numbers. In 2022 Putin signed a decree simplifying the process for granting Russian citizenship to Ukrainian orphans and children without parental care. Children were placed with Russian families, and some were adopted or put under guardianship. That is very close to a textbook case of what Articles 49 and 50 forbid.

Russia's defence, stated fairly

Russia's government argues that it saved children from a war zone, that many were orphans or in institutions with no one to care for them, that Ukraine's shelling put them in danger, and that Russia has a humanitarian duty to care for them. Russian officials have also said that they cooperate with requests to reunite children with relatives who come forward.

The evacuation of children from danger can indeed be lawful and even admirable. The question is what happened next. The law permits temporary evacuation for safety, with records, with parental consent where possible, and with a duty to return. It does not permit changing a child's nationality, placing them for adoption in the occupier's country or putting them through programmes designed to make them identify with the occupier. Reports from investigators, journalists and returned children describe exactly those things: new Russian documents, Russian families and patriotic education. The rescue defence cannot cover the parts of the programme that look designed not to return children but to keep them.

Rescuers do not usually need new passports for the children they save.

A long and painful history

Taking children from a defeated or subordinate people and raising them as one's own is one of the oldest instruments of conquest, and the record of it is not confined to any one nation.

Nazi Germany kidnapped thousands of children in occupied Poland and elsewhere who were judged racially suitable and placed them with German families; after the war, officials of the SS race and resettlement office were tried at Nuremberg, and kidnapping children was part of the case against them. In Argentina, during the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, babies born to detained and disappeared women were taken and given to families connected to the regime; the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have spent decades finding them, one by one, using genetic testing. Australia removed generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, and in 2008 its prime minister formally apologized to the Stolen Generations. The United States, through its system of federal Indian boarding schools, removed Native children from their families and communities for generations, and a federal investigation launched in 2021 began to document that history; in 2024 President Biden apologized for it.

There is a reason humanitarian law and genocide law treat this practice so gravely. The Genocide Convention lists forcibly transferring children of a group to another group as one of the acts that can constitute genocide, when done with intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. Some scholars and some official bodies have argued that Russia's programme meets that definition; others say the evidence of genocidal intent, as opposed to the war crimes charged, has not been established. No court has ruled on that question, and this post does not claim it has.

Progressives in the United States have spent years pressing their own country to reckon with its boarding schools. That reckoning is exactly what makes the case against Russia credible when we make it. Standards that apply only to others are not standards.

Will Putin ever face a courtroom?

Realistically, the ICC cannot try anyone in absentia, and it has no police. A warrant matters only if a member state arrests the person named and hands them over.

That does not make the warrant meaningless. In August 2023, Putin did not attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in person, joining by video instead, after South Africa, a member of the court, faced the question of whether it would have to arrest him. In September 2024, he visited Mongolia, also a court member, which did not arrest him; the court's judges later found that Mongolia had failed to comply with its obligations and referred the matter to the court's member states. The warrant narrows the map of where Putin can travel freely, and it stands as a formal judicial finding of reasonable grounds that will not expire.

Warrants have outlasted regimes before. Slobodan Milosevic was handed to the Yugoslav tribunal in 2001, after he lost power; Charles Taylor of Liberia was arrested and later convicted by a special court. No one can predict whether that will happen in this case, and it would be wrong to suggest it will. But history counsels against assuming it cannot.

Bringing children home

The most urgent question is not about Putin's travel plans. It is about the children.

Return has happened in small numbers, child by child, often through mediation. Qatar has brokered the return of groups of children. The Vatican sent an envoy to work on the issue. Ukrainian government programmes and civil society groups have tracked down individual children and supported relatives, often grandmothers or aunts, who made long, difficult journeys through third countries to bring them back. Each return requires knowing where the child is, proving the family relationship and getting Russian authorities to agree. Older children sometimes find their own way home; very young children may not remember Ukraine at all.

Any eventual settlement of the war will have to address the children explicitly. Many advocates argue that the return of deported children, with independent verification, should be a condition of any agreement, not a later detail. That is a position people of very different politics can share. The return of children is about as close to a universal moral claim as international politics has.

The quiet machinery of tracing

There is an unglamorous part of humanitarian law that matters enormously here: record-keeping. The Geneva Conventions require parties to an international armed conflict to set up national information bureaus that record and share details about protected persons in their hands, and they give the International Committee of the Red Cross a central role in collecting that information and passing it between families and authorities. The idea, born of the world wars, is that no one should vanish into an enemy's territory without a trace.

For children, these duties are the difference between a temporary separation and a permanent loss. A child whose name, birth date, parents and place of origin are recorded and shared can be found. A child whose documents are replaced, whose surname is changed and whose file is sealed in a foreign adoption system may never be. That is why the law's insistence on registration and identity, which can read like bureaucratic fine print, is really about whether a grandmother in Kherson ever sees her grandson again.

It is also why the work of documentation, by investigators, journalists and families themselves, matters long before any trial. Every verified name is a child who can be asked for by name in a negotiation.

What you can do

• Ask your members of Congress to make children part of any deal. Use our representatives page to find your representative, senators and their phone numbers and contact forms, and to see their latest votes. Ask whether they will insist that the verified return of deported Ukrainian children be part of any peace settlement the United States supports.
• Follow the votes on Ukraine. The Congress votes and bills page lists recent bills and votes, including aid and sanctions measures related to the war.
• Notice where both parties agree. Support for Ukraine's children has drawn backing from both parties. Our common ground page shows bills that passed with support from both sides, a reminder that this is not a partisan cause.
• Support Ukrainian families near you. Many Ukrainians arrived in the United States after 2022 through humanitarian programmes. The organizations directory lists immigrant services and legal aid nonprofits in every state.
• Keep reading across sources. The human rights and foreign aid topic page brings together reporting on war crimes investigations, the ICC and humanitarian efforts in Ukraine and elsewhere.