Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian ombudswoman for children’s rights, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague, has reported that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russians have deported more than 700,000 Ukrainian children to Russia.

Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian ombudswoman for children’s rights, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague, has reported that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russians have deported more than 700,000 Ukrainian children to Russia.

  • tal@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    700,000 Ukrainian children

    That has to be a substantial portion of the child population in the occupied areas.

    Ukraine’s got like 36M people, and it’s an aging population; not weighted towards children.

    goes looking

    https://www.populationpyramid.net/ukraine/

    So for Ukraine as a whole, that’s ~1.2M ages 0-4, ~2M ages 5-9, ~1.3M ages 10-14. I don’t know if “children” includes teens in this context, but if so, another ~1.6M ages 15-19.

    That’s over all of Ukraine. Russia has fully occupied:

    • Crimea, population 2.1M

    Russia has nearly all occupied:

    • Luhansk Oblast, population 2.1M

    Russia has partly occupied:

    • Donetsk Oblast, population 4M

    • Zaporizhzhia Oblast, population 1.6M

    • Kherson Oblast, population 1M

    And in the latter two, the capital cities, major population centers, are not (presently) occupied. They’re occupying areas with maybe conservatively a quarter-ish of Ukraine’s population.

    So using my above count and including teens, that’s 6.1M children for Ukraine as a whole. A quarter of that is about 1.5M children. 700k would have to be something like half of the child population in occupied areas.

    I’ll concede that there are probably people who left non-occupied areas for Russia as well; there are going to be war refugees in the path of the fighting itself, and some people are going to flee to Russia rather than elsewhere in Ukraine or to other countries; I assume that that’s got to be included in the count. But even so, it still seems like a pretty considerable number.

    • lusterko@kbin.socialOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      I don’t know if “children” includes teens in this context, but if so, another ~1.6M ages 15-19.

      At least in Ukraine if you’re under 18 you’re considered to be a child.

      I’ll concede that there are probably people who left non-occupied areas for Russia as well

      This, plus children from the areas that were occupied by russia previously (Kherson region, Kharkiv region, possibly even to the north of Kyiv)