Melania Works with Putin to Reunite Families

The eight children were among thousands who were separated from their families during what the Kremlin called “evacuation” procedures in Ukraine — but were actually forced deportations.

Many were ripped away from their families or orphanages during the chaos of the first year of the war, when Russian forces occupied areas in eastern Ukraine.

Whole boarding schools were also emptied out and the kids loaded onto buses before disappearing without a trace.

Some were even later put on a twisted adoption database where they can be sorted by age, eye and color, and number of siblings, in what non-governmental humanitarian groups have characterized as “digital child trafficking masked as bureaucracy.”

The forced separations earned Putin an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in March 2023.

Ukraine has struggled to locate and repatriate the children kidnapped by Russian forces since the beginning of its full-scale invasion in 2022, with officials saying at least 19,500 children remain unaccounted for, but the actual number could be far higher.

The Kremlin has scattered the kidnapped children to more than 200 facilities across Russia to undergo pro-Russian “re-education” and military training, according to a recent report by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.

Others have been forcefully adopted by Russian families, according to Zelenska, making their return even more difficult.