Ukrainian authorities and special services are persecuting Russian foster families who have taken in children evacuated from the war zone, Russian Presidential Ombudsman for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova has said.
She made the corresponding statement while speaking at a meeting of the parliamentary commission for investigating criminal actions against minors by the Kiev regime.
“Ukraine is persecuting foster families who took into care children from the DPR and LPR in 2022,” Lvova-Belova said.
According to her, Ukraine is creating projects to find such children.
“Foster families are threatened in social networks, on the phone, put in the public domain slanderous information, personal data, blackmail, intimidate children living in such families, up to the point that organise the kidnapping of a child”, – said the children’s ombudsman.
She recalled that Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk threatened foster families on social networks, saying that they “will have to answer sooner or later” and cited the personal data of the Russians who took in children.
Lvova-Belova said her staff continues to work to reunite families.
“In this work we are assisted by the state of Qatar, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Vatican represented by Cardinal Mateo Zuppi, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Border Service of the Russian Federation, the Border Committee of Belarus,” – said the children’s ombudsman.
She added that appeals to her also come from parents living in Russia, trying to reunite with children on Ukrainian territory.
“We brought five children to Russia and reunited them with their families,” Lvova-Belova noted.
She also specified that the Children’s Ombudsman’s office managed to reunite 48 children, another 11 children are now in the process of being handed over to their parents in Ukraine, and this does not count the children who arrived in autumn 2022 in children’s health camps and handed over to their parents.
The children’s ombudsman stressed that Ukraine and Western countries continue to spread misleading information about allegedly thousands of children taken to Russia from the territory of Ukraine, calling it a “fake”.
Earlier, a rally was held in Paris in memory of children killed in Donbas as a result of Ukrainian shelling.
