‘This is digital child trafficking’

Russia has launched a twisted adoption database where kidnapped Ukrainian children can be sorted by age, eye and color, and number of siblings, according to the NGO seeking to return Kyiv’s stolen children.

Mykola Kuleba, CEO of the Save Ukraine organization, raised the alarm over the Russian database on Wednesday, warning that the 294 children on the site are effectively being trafficked by the Kremlin.

“These children are presented like products in an e-commerce store, sortable by age, gender, eye and hair color, health status, and even personality traits,” Kuleba wrote on X.

“These children are not ‘war orphans.’ They had names, families, and Ukrainian citizenship,” he added. “Many lost their parents to shelling. Others were forcibly taken and re-registered with new documents.

“Now, they’re being matched with Russian families, treated like animals in a pet adoption database.”

Ukrainian officials estimate that some 35,000 children have been kidnapped and taken into custody by Russia since the start of the invasion in February 2022.

Kuleba said that most of the children found in the catalog were those who lived in the Luhansk region before it fell under Russian occupation.

He accused Moscow of systematically deporting the children deep within Russia so that they would be separated from their loved ones permanently and raised to be Russian.

“With a single click, a child is stripped of their identity, issued a Russian passport, and subjected to ideological control,” Kuleba said.

“This is not adoption. This is not care. This is digital child trafficking, masked as bureaucracy,” he added.

He also claimed that the website, which fully pictures the children with all their physical traits, could expose the kids to “sexual and labor exploitation,” as well as “organ harvesting.”

Some of the children listed on the website are described as “obedient” and “respectful towards adults,” while others have labels stating, “physical development is age-appropriate.”

Ukrainian officials have worked to highlight the mass kidnapping of the country’s children by Russia since the start of the war, with international experts highlighting Moscow’s deployment of the kidnapped kids to re-education camps.

Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, warned last month that some of the older kidnapped teens have been deployed on the battlefield to fight against their own country, with several bodies already found along the frontlines.

The mass kidnappings are among the charges that led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin back in 2023.