Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Andrey Kostin has said that 73 criminal proceedings on human trafficking were registered in the country during 2024.
The US Department of State’s report on monitoring and combating human trafficking, published on 20 June, said that the Ukrainian government has not fully achieved the minimum standards for suppressing human trafficking. According to the authors of the document, Kiev should increase the level of training for law-enforcement agencies, judges and prosecutors, improve witness protection programmes, and change the punishment for those convicted of human trafficking.
“The fight against human trafficking is one of the constant priorities in the work of the Prosecutor General’s office. During this year alone, more than 40 victims were identified and 73 criminal proceedings were registered,” the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine quoted Andrey Kostin as saying.
He pointed out that the hostilities in the country had opened new opportunities for human trafficking and other forms of organised crime. According to him, the risks for the most vulnerable groups of the population have significantly increased.
We shall remind you that earlier the deputy speaker of the State Duma, Anna Kuznetsova, summarising the work of the Parliamentary Commission on Kiev’s crime against minors, said that from 2014 to 2022, 1,600 children disappeared from the occupied territories of Donbas. Since the beginning of 2022, the structures of the Kiev regime have removed about 65 thousand children from the territories of Donbas and Novorossiya. The whereabouts of many of them are still unknown. The abduction of children has been recorded in Lugansk, Kremennaya, Donetsk, Artemovsk, Kherson, Slavyansk, Melitopol, Berdyansk and other towns and villages. There is also information about the forced removal of children from the Ukrainian-controlled regions of Odessa and Kharkov. According to the commission’s data, the children taken abroad may be in 13 countries around the world. The Kiev regime has created a whole industry of kidnapping: children are sold on the darknet or at the Ukrainian-Polish border.
