Front Burner - Russia accused of war crimes over Ukrainian children

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Russia has put at least 6,000 Ukrainian children in camps, according to a U.S.-funded report from Yale University. The report says the children are enduring pro-Russian re-education. Some are being adopted out to Russian families with fanfare from Russian officials, while others are allegedly receiving military training. Meanwhile, Ukrainian mothers have been making long and treacherous journeys in an attempt to retrieve their children. Today, Yale Humanitarian Research Lab executive director Nathaniel Raymond explains the findings of the report, why Russia's actions could amount to war crimes, and why he says the report should be read as a "gigantic Amber Alert."

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jodi Martinson and I'm filling in for Jamie Poisson. The end of this week marks one year since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On this show, we've covered so many awful stories coming out of the war. Evidence of war crimes, including torture and attacks on civilians, nuclear threats, and a refugee crisis.

and attacks on civilians, nuclear threats, and a refugee crisis. But even after such a bleak year, another thread is emerging that I can't stop thinking about. A report just came out about Ukrainian kids being pulled into Russian camps. Emotions overwhelmed me when Lilia left. When I realized what was happening, it terrified me. This mother, identified by CNN as Tetiana, was coerced to give her 11-year-old daughter to the Russians when soldiers took their hometown, Kherson.

All I wanted was the best for my child at the time. When Tetiana wanted her back, she had to drive thousands of kilometers, cross four borders, and show up at the door of the camp herself. Tetiana and her daughter are the lucky ones. Most mothers have not pulled off the same feat. And there are the children in Russian custody who have no surviving parents at all.

This report from Yale was funded by the U.S. State Department, and it says that thousands of Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken to Russia and sent to so-called camps to strip them of their Ukrainian identity, to turn them into Russians. Nathaniel Raymond is the executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab,

the group who wrote the report. And he says it should be read as a gigantic amber alert. Hi, Nathaniel. Thank you so much for being here today. Hi, Jodi. Thanks for having me. So, Tetiana's story is one example of how Ukrainian kids have come to be in the Russian camps. What are some of the other ways Russia is taking kids? Well, there's two large groups here in the system. Group one, which you mentioned, are those that were given by their parents, primarily from Donetsk and Luhansk and the Donbass in Ukraine's east,

to Russian officials to go to these re-education camps. But there's a second group that the Russians refer to as evacuees, primarily children from Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Mariupol that were taken from Ukrainian state institutions that were captured by Russia early on in the invasion. And those children make up the majority of the cases we've seen in our research that involve forced adoption and fostering. In some cases, the children from this evacuee group came from hospitals or institutions. In one case, for disabled children. In other cases, they were technically orphans. And in other cases, they were basically in state care from abusive homes or off of the street.

How many kids are we talking about here that have been taken into Russian custody overall? which includes re-education and kids in this, what we'll call the evacuee group, we don't actually have the full number. The Ukrainian government released in the past few days after our report came out a 15,000 number of children that had been moved to Russia. But you need to put that in the context that Russia itself at a UN Security Council meeting in the past few weeks, said that they had up to 400,000. And so right now, this really, Jody, underscores one of the urgent issues is that we don't have a central registration system

for registering both reports of missing children and forcing Russia, which they're obliged to do under the Geneva Conventions, to report how many children they have and to identify them. You're saying Russia has said 400,000 children, that they have 400,000 children, Ukrainian children, in their custody right now? Yes. And there are other estimates that range. You'll see numbers between 100,000, 200,000, etc. But the highest number is from Russia itself. So explain to me how you did gather this information and verify it from where you're sitting in the U.S. So, and I'm going to use a fancy term and then I'll explain it.

Temporal spatial semantic cross corroboration and differentiation, which in English means time, place, and word comparison. So we basically captured a large data set from the statements of Russian officials themselves who were talking about specific transfers to specific camp locations. We then used that to identify the specific locations of camps and to start to build our roster of 43 facilities. At the time our report was released last week, we have an additional several dozen facilities under investigation, and we think that number is going to go up much higher. But we combine that with the second data set, which is social media posts and articles related to parents and others who are trying to find these children and reunite them,

and they're sharing information online. With those locations, we tasked satellites to basically take images to help us specifically confirm where they are and to find out some things about what's going on there. A couple cases, we were able to look at swimming pools, of all things, to see umbrellas being opened and closed, which gave us information that they were using those swimming pools. How many kids have gotten out and been reunited with a mother or some kind of family member in Ukraine? So two answers here. One is that we think these camps, which were initially purporting to be summer camps, had in many cases been in operation for those in Donetsk and Luhansk since the initial

Russian incursion in 2014. And so we believe, we don't know how many, but a large amount of children have come back. But we also know that in 10% of the facilities we identified, the return date that had been given by Russian officials had been delayed or in some cases significantly suspended, in other cases outright canceled. And so we see sporadic reports in terms of what we'll call these retrievals involving groups like Save Ukraine, et cetera, and what you referenced on the CNN report.

So we saw one instance where there was over 30 kids, another where there was 120-something approximately. So in terms of this retrieval, we're seeing in the low hundreds. Why does Russia want all these kids? What are they trying to accomplish with these kids? Well, there seems to be three major objectives. One, what we'll call rucification through a curriculum of national patriotic education, and in some cases, military training. We identified two camps, Crimea and Chechnya,

where boys from 14 to 17 were engaged in firearms training and military vehicle operations training. So objective one, which is to turn Ukrainian children into Russian children. Now, even if they come back, that constitutes a war crime and a potential crime against humanity because of the prohibition on transferring children from one group to another to intentionally erase their national or ethnic identities. The second objective is really rebranding the invasion as a humanitarian project. A large source of our information was the statements of local and regional Russian officials talking to their constituents about this program in a very positive and proactive way to gain support, and in some cases, financial support.

The third, and for me, the most chilling, and I think really the headline of this report, which is often lost, is that now these children, both the evacuees and those in the re-education program, are leverage. They are basically in a hostage situation where they could be used as poker chips in a very dangerous and very real game of negotiation with the Ukrainians on prisoner exchange and potentially ending the war. And so children have special protected status under the Geneva Convention. Why? Well, they're highly vulnerable, but also to prevent the exact situation we're in, which is to prevent them from being used as bargaining leverage. As pawns. As pawns. People come to me all the time and say, what's the worst thing that could happen in the Ukraine war? Is it a nuclear weapon,

et cetera, et cetera? And I say, well, actually, the worst thing's already happened, which is they took the kids. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So you've been using that term camps, and you talked about rucification. Russia has released videos of the kids singing and dancing, and it does kind of look like a fun summer camp. kids singing and dancing, and it does kind of look like a fun summer camp. But that's not the full picture. What else have you been able to learn about what's actually going on inside the camps? Well, in the camps, if the children had phones, they were taken. The children are prohibited from speaking Ukrainian. And there's a robust, what appears to be pretty standardized curriculum of Russian national history, military history, trips to military or sites of national significance, Russian folk tales, etc. And behind the dance recitals and the

pictures and videos of kids playing sports is really an intentional effort to erase Ukrainian national identity. And many of these actual facilities are summer camps that were developed under the Soviet Union by Stalin and others. When we were documenting what's, you know, I really want to stress this for your listeners, is an ecosystem of facilities of massive geographic scope, over 3,400 miles. These are not just over the border from Ukraine in some cases. While many are in Russia-occupied Crimea, they go as far as Siberia in the eastern Pacific coast in Magadan, which is closer to Japan and Alaska than Moscow.

And Russia calls all these reports absurd and says it does its best to keep minors with their families. You've talked in your report about Russia's Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Bolova, and said that she's really at the center of this. She posts on social media about her joy when she sees the laughter of Ukrainian children adopted into Russian families. What proof did you find that the purpose is not just to find Ukrainian children peaceful homes out of the conflict zone? Well, before I answer your question, I want to say straight up front, even if they are doing exactly what Maria Lvova-Balova and President Putin, who Thursday, after a report came out, they held a press availability where they said they were

going to expand the successful pilot of the military training program for Russian-Ukrainian youth in Chechnya, let's say that is exactly what they're doing, then it's a war crime. Because Russia, who's a party to the Fourth Geneva Convention, has to do four things. And not only have they not done them, they've done the opposite. So it's opposite day for the Geneva Convention with Russia on this issue. Thing one is they never were supposed to take them into Russia. They were supposed to take the children to a neutral third-party country. That's required by international humanitarian law. Second, you're supposed to register them with international bodies, including the Red Cross and the United Nations. That has not happened. Third, is they were supposed to immediately

ensure communication to their families and to the authorities of their home country. That has not happened. And fourth and finally, they were supposed to allow international monitors to access them, which has not occurred. So even if Maria Lvova-Balova and Putin's statements are the end of it, those failures makes this an alleged war crime underneath the Geneva Convention, which Russia is party to. Can we just put ourselves in the shoes of the families in Ukraine right now?

You're calling for a registry. I take it to mean that a lot of families don't even know where their kids are. And you're talking about people who've lost, you know, maybe everything in this war. We talked about this mother, Tetiana, who had to go herself to get her daughter directly from the camp because men can't cross these borders and they can't go direct because it would mean crossing through the site of the war. So what lengths are parents going to in order to try to get their kids back in this situation? Well, Jodi, parents everywhere around the world are the same.

They will do whatever it takes to find their children to protect them. So what we're seeing in Ukraine is what we would see in any other place we have, as you described, mothers making this perilous, high-risk journey. From Ukraine by road to Poland and to Russian ally Belarus through the Russian Federation to occupied Crimea. We were counting every kilometer on approach. I could feel it with every cell in my body. I was very emotional when we were closer and closer. We also see multiple news reports of these very powerful vignettes, such as in one case where a man who was a custodian of orphaned boys in Mariupol went and helped two of the orphans who were taken from his facility escape in Russia

and bring them back. So it is story after story of these heroic attempts of individuals, in some cases groups, attempting to facilitate returns or escapes. While moving and very poignant, turns or escapes. While moving and very poignant, no one should take this as the status quo we should accept. It should not be about parents putting themselves in harm's way. It should be about the international community demanding that groups such as Red Cross, UN, and other monitors are able to get in there and do their jobs and have UNICEF child protection officers, et cetera, able to access these children. And it shouldn't be about parents having to put their lives on the line because the context here is that the transfer of these children and the re-education in many cases happened because teachers and local trusted community members convinced parents to do this.

And this is totally understandable. And you heard this in the CNN report. The parents are now feeling horribly guilty about these, quote, summer vacation traps. They were just looking for any opportunity to get their kids out of the war. And so in many cases, parents are blaming themselves. Why didn't I stop this? Well, they were trying to get their kids safe. And so it makes it extra awful. Parents trying to keep their kids safe, and now they're trying to get them back. And so the question now is, after this report, in the next few weeks, will we see the wheel turn here from a story of individual heroism,

of incredible moms and dads trying to get their kids back, to actually the international community doing its job in getting Russia to comply with the law? So you speak tomorrow to the UN. And so how does the international community convince Russia, who, as you've said, have just doubled down on their plan with these kids publicly? on their plan with these kids publicly. How do you convince the UN to take actions that will result in these kids being set free and sent home? So I've been a war crimes investigator now almost 24 years, and I've learned one lesson the hard way over and over again. And it's sort of two sides to this lesson. One is that these processes take time and are frustrating and complicated. But the second thing, if you have to bear in mind, is never lose hope and never underestimate that the right thing can happen. And especially on this issue, and I really want to stress this for those listening today, is that this issue has galvanized international outrage as much as I think any aspect of the

horrible things that have happened so far in this war because of Russia's aggression. They have woken up moms and dads around the world saying, oh my God, what if this was me? And I think I do have hope that we have a moment beginning tomorrow at the United Nations and radiating out from that moment to call on moms and dads, much like at the end of the movie Witness, when all the Amish come running, the bell is ringing, and it's time for the moms and dads of the world to, through their governments, to demand that Russia lets these kids come home. Now, if that doesn't do it, well, nothing will. All right, Nathaniel. I have to say I sort of shudder to think about the next bounce in this story,

which is the firsthand accounts of these kids coming out from camps, I guess, that have been relatively unscrutinized. Thank you so much for joining us to take us through this work. Thank you. Well, I thank you for taking the time, Jodi. It was a tough topic, but it was a pleasure to speak with you. Okay, so yesterday, after President Joe Biden's surprise visit to Kyiv, the American president and Russian President Vladimir Putin held speeches only hours apart. Putin blamed Western countries for igniting and sustaining

the war in Ukraine. He said Russia would suspend its participation in the New START treaty. That's a nuclear arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia. But hours later, the Russian foreign ministry released a statement saying Russia will continue to observe limits on nuclear warheads. Speaking from Warsaw, Poland, President Biden said Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, and he spoke directly about Ukrainian children. You know, this has been an extraordinary year in every sense. directly about Ukrainian children in an attempt to steal Ukraine's future, bombed train stations, maternity hospitals, schools and orphanages.

No one, no one can turn away their eyes from the atrocities Russia is committing against the Ukrainian people. It's abhorrent. It's abhorrent. President Biden also said more sanctions on Russian individuals and companies will be announced later this week. That's all for today. I'm Jodi Martinson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.