By John F. Kerins, JD Candidate, American University Washington College of Law ’26
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian children have been separated from their parents, transferred across borders, and placed in sites controlled by Russian or occupation authorities.[1] These transfers are not a by-product of wartime chaos, nor an attempt to evacuate them from danger; rather, investigations show an organized, state-directed system of transfer designed to strip children from their culture, their families, and their homes, to remake them entirely.[2] This raises a serious legal question, one as old as international law itself: what do we call this? Is this genocide under international law—and how urgent is the prevention of genocide when identity itself becomes a primary tactic of wartime aggression?
Legal Foundations: What International Law Demands
Two treaties provide the legal backbone for understanding, condemning, and responding to these practices. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the most widely ratified treaty in the world, recognizes that each child has the right to their own identity, to stay connected with their family, and to be protected from abduction or unlawful cross-border transfers.[3] These are not aspirational ideals, but obligations CRC signatories must uphold.[4] The Genocide Convention of 1948 goes further, defining genocide to include “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” when done with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.[5] That line was written deliberately, after a century of conflicts where children were often the most direct target of historical and cultural erasure.[6] Together, these treaties place two kinds of obligations on states and the international community: to protect children now, and to guard against efforts to erase or destroy a group’s identity by targeting its next generation.
What the Evidence Shows: Systematic Transfer + Identity Targeting
Recent reports provide chilling confirmation of a large-scale system of child and identity warfare. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has identified at least 210 facilities in Russia and occupied territories holding Ukrainian children since the invasion began.[7] These are not neutral shelters; more than half are running so-called “re-education programs” designed to erase Ukrainian identity and replace it with a Russian one.[8] These include camps, orphanages, cadet schools, religious institutions, and other such locations.[9] Nearly one in five involves militarization, with children in uniforms, drilling as cadets, and sometimes even taking part in basic military drills and tasks.[10] The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report of 21 March 2025 documents widespread violations: children torn from families, forced to speak Russian, made to learn Russian materials, denied contact with family, and educational attainment severely disrupted.[11] Families searching for their loved ones are left in the dark due to Russia either underreporting or failing to report full lists of takings and locations.[12] Investigative findings show Russia refusing full disclosure of lists of transferred children, hindering family reunification.[13] Some children are declared eligible for adoption under Russian or local occupation jurisdictions without parental consent or judicial safeguards.[14] This is not a collection of scattered abuses; it is a blueprint for engineering social compliance on a national scale.
Identity as Warfare: The Perpendicular Lens
Beyond what is illegal, there is something deeply strategic at play. Children are not just victims of conflict; they are battlegrounds of cultural, political, and demographic engineering. When a state kidnaps a child, re-names them, forces Russian learning, severs family ties, and suppresses language—it is waging war on memory, on lineage, on identity. Historical analogies are stark and relevant: from Nazi Lebensborn programs to forcibly “Germanized” Polish children, through to assimilation programs in settler colonial contexts.[15] The Soviet scourge of the Holodomor wreaked havoc on Ukrainian lives, namely children, through a targeted campaign of tying resources to Russia.[16] Canada, Australia, and the United States all ran programs that took indigenous children and forced them into boarding schools where their culture, language, and identities were largely forbidden.[17] These are not precedents merely of human rights abuses; they are precedents of existential erasure. The scars resulting from these grievous wounds, including both past and ongoing present crises involving Ukrainian children, will have lasting effects over the coming generations.
Legal Gravitas: Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity
To label this genocide under the Genocide Convention, two elements are required. First, the actus reus. Here, the forcible transfer of children from the Ukrainian group into Russian control satisfies this element of the Convention. The Yale report, alongside OHCHR findings, establishes repeated, widespread acts of this kind, clearly establishing a violation of the Genocide Convention.[18] Second, the mens rea required is a specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the protected group. Intent is rarely admitted but can be legally inferred from patterns, such as the forcible transfers of children by Russian government officials.[19] Also relevant are war crimes and crimes against humanity under instruments like the Rome Statute: forced deportation or transfer, persecution, taking children away from family for non-just causes, and acts done in the context of widespread or systematic attack are all prohibited under the Rome Statute.[20] Despite genocide being harder to prove in court, these other categories afford accountability mechanisms that can be (and are being) pursued.[21] Regardless of whether these claims succeed, it is vital that the international community jointly and resoundingly work to actively prevent an ongoing act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, their way of life, and their cultural history.
Prevention, Accountability, and What Must Be Done
Under international law, prevention is not optional. The Genocide Convention obliges all States Parties to prevent genocide, not merely punish it.[22] The CRC similarly demands protective and remedial action.[23] Immediately, the international community must move for full documentation & evidence preservation. All available data concerning the victims of Russia’s genocidal actions, including but not limited to satellite imagery, witness testimony, and all institutional records must be safely collected. Governments and international organizations should prioritize identifying and returning children, preserving their identity, reuniting them with families or safe guardians, respecting their Ukrainian heritage as soon as possible. Enforcement of ICC arrest warrants and ongoing consideration of ICJ cases can provide provisional matters while the international community verifies the qualifiers under genocide, war crime, or crimes against humanity law.[24] Individual nations must sanction individuals, institutions, or agencies shown to be complicit in transfers and identity erasure, while demanding transparency and access for Ukrainian authorities and independent monitors. Finally, this crisis must maintain international attention.[25] Identity theft of children is not a fringe atrocity; it is a legacy of assaults on national selfhood and a war of attrition against a nation already beset by physical warfare through indoctrination and capitulation of that nation’s future: its children.
Conclusion:
The forced transfer of Ukrainian children is not only a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but, when taken together with documented re-education, adoption, and suppression of language and family ties, these acts may constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention’s prohibition on forcible transfer of children.[26] Whether or not courts ultimately issue that label, the practical, moral, strategic, and legal urgency is unmistakable.
Children are the future of any nation. To steal a childhood is to steal part of a people’s past and promise. Delayed legal rulings alone cannot fix this issue – ongoing support for humanitarian organizations dedicated to tracking down and returning these children to Ukraine must persist, ensuring the next generation belongs to Ukraine.
[1] Paige Farrenkopf, Caitlin N. Howarth, & Nathaniel A. Raymond et al., Ukraine’s Stolen Children: Inside Russia’s Network of Re-education and Militarization, Yale Sch. of Pub. health. (Sep. 16, 2025), https://files-profile.medicine.yale.edu/documents/e6294def-3f80-4d71-9cc7-91f6af70a523.
[2] Id. at 6.
[3] See Convention on the Rights of the Child, Nov. 20, 1989, 1577 U.N.T.S. 3 [hereinafter CRC], https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/crc.pdf.
[4] See id.
[5] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide art. 2, Dec. 9, 1948, 102 Stat. 3045, 78 U.N.T.S. 277 [hereinafter Genocide Convention], https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf.
[6] Id. at Art. (II)(e) (quoting “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”).
[7] Farrenkopf et al., supra note 1, at 1.
[8] Id. at 10 (“In July 2023, the military-patriotic center Young Patriot opened for the explicit purpose of re-educating children from Ukraine and exposing them to military training”).
[9] Id. at 9-10.
[10] Sasha Vakulina, Deported Ukrainian Children taken to at least 210 facilities in Russia, investigation shows, EuroNews (Sep. 16, 2025, at 6:00 GMT), https://www.euronews.com/2025/09/16/deported-ukrainian-children-taken-to-at-least-210-facilities-in-russia-investigation-shows; see also Farrenkopf, supra note 1 at 7-8.
[11] See OHCHR, Report on the Impact of the Armed Conflict and Occupation on Children’s Rights in Ukraine (24 February 2022 – 31 December 2024), (Mar. 21, 2025) https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/form/2025-03-21-ohchr-report-children-s-rights-in-ukraine.pdf.
[12] See id. at 16.
[13] See id. at 9.
[14] Sébastian SEIBT, “Demographic Conquest:” Inside Russia’s campaign to indoctrinate kidnapped Ukrainian children, France 24 (Sep. 21, 2025, at 9:33 GMT), https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250921-demographic-conquest-inside-russia-campaign-indoctrinate-kidnapped-ukrainian-children.
[15] Lukas Schretter and Nadjeschda Stoffers, Ambivalent but Not Indifferent: Interview Narratives of Lebensborn Children Born in the Wienerwald Maternity Home, 1938-1945, in Childhood during War and Genocide: Agency, Survival, and Representation 1, 283 (2024), https://www.wallstein-open-library.de/openaccess/9783835355996-oa.pdf.
[16] Id. at 274-77.
[17] United Nations, Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools, Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, U.N. Doc. E/C.19/2009/CRP.1 (2009), https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/IPS_Boarding_Schools.pdf.
[18] See Farrenkopf et al., supra note 1; see also OHCHR, supra note 11.
[19] Nathaniel Raymond, Russia’s Kidnapping and Re-education of Ukrainian Children: Fact Sheet, Yale Sch. of Med. (Mar. 17, 2025),https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/fact-sheet-russias-kidnapping-and-re-education-of-ukraines-children/.
[20] Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17, 1998, 2187 U.N.T.S. 3, https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2024-05/Rome-Statute-eng.pdf.
[21] See Farrenkopf et al., supra note 1, at 4-5.
[22] See Genocide Convention, supra note 5.
[23] See CRC, supra note 3.
[24] The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court: A Primer, CRS Report No. R48004 (Feb. 19, 2021), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48004.
[25] Jen Ang, Three Years On: Russia’s War on Ukraine’s Forcibly Displaced Children, Foreign Pol’y Ctr (Feb. 26, 2025), https://fpc.org.uk/three-years-on-russias-war-on-ukraines-forcibly-displaced-children/.
[26] See CRC, supra note 3; Genocide Convention, supra note 5.