Mykola Kuleba, Executive Director of Save Ukraine, said that over the 10 years of war, about 20,000 children were lost in Ukraine. He emphasized that they were lost because they are growing up like Russians today. Kuleba said this in an interview with Online.ua, UNN reports.
We don't know today how many thousands of children live in the occupied territories, because there is no such figure. But we can talk about approximate data on how many children have been lost over the past 10 years. Exactly lost, because they are growing up today as Russians. They have come to terms with it, many of them have already grown up... They have become adults who were formed either under occupation or on the territory of Russia. This figure reaches about 20 thousand
He noted that different figures are being quoted today, and it should be understood that the war has been going on for 10 years, which means that we are talking about millions of people.
"Between 15 and 20% of Ukraine's child population has been under Russian rule for 10 years. About half a million children lived in Crimea alone. There were a million children in Donbas, and two-thirds of them were occupied in 2014," Kuleba said.
He emphasized that the Russian side reported the evacuation of 744 thousand children who were registered after the full-scale invasion. But, according to him, one can doubt the veracity of this figure, that "it may not be 744 thousand, but 500 thousand, but it is still a very large figure.
"According to my calculations, Crimea, Donbas, and the new territories are about one and a half million children. There is no statistics on how many of them moved to Ukraine or other countries. But after calculating the statistics from the occupied territories during the full-scale invasion, we can say that more than a million children were either under Russian rule or in occupation or deported to Russia," Kuleba added.
The director of the charity organization emphasized that these are only those who have been identified, because "we have to talk about all Ukrainian children who are either hostages or exiles, deported or abducted.
Recall
Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said during the fourth meeting of advisers on the Davos Peace Formula that Ukraine had returned 517 illegally deported children and 2,828 adults, including 150 civilians, from Russia.