(OSV News) ─ Ukrainian child advocate Mykola Kuleba is pleading for the Vatican's assistance, after publicly highlighting what he said was one of several databases used by Russian occupation officials to market abducted Ukrainian children to Russian foster and adoption families.
Those databases ─ about which Yale School of Public Health researcher Nathaniel Raymond testified before the United Nations Security Council in December 2024 ─ are part of a decade-long coordinated effort by Russia to remove and "renationalize" thousands of Ukrainian children, in violation of multiple international laws.
"We need a strong position from the Vatican, and pressure on Russia to give all information about Ukrainian children in occupied (Ukrainian) territories or who have been transferred to Russia ─ to help us identify and know their condition of health, of life, to be able to talk with these kids," Kuleba, founder of child advocacy organization Save Ukraine and Ukraine's child ombudsman from 2014-2021, told OSV News.
"Maybe the pope will do his best to help us find more kids," he added.
On Aug. 7, Kuleba ─ who said he has so far secured the return of more than 750 forcibly transferred Ukrainian children ─ released several social media posts on the X and Telegram platforms, showing images (with translations) attributed to a database operated by the unrecognized "Luhansk People's Republic," Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
OSV News is unable to visit the LPR database and independently verify the information. Russian authorities have heavily restricted internet access to databases from internet connections outside of Russia and Russian-controlled territories.
In the images posted by Kuleba, the LPR's "Ministry of Education and Science" is seen to invite "prospective adoptive parents" to view photos of the Ukrainian children, along with their alleged first names (many of which have been changed by Russian officials, according to numerous human rights reports), ages, and a list of their traits.
Among Kuleba's images from the LPR database are depicted two alleged 10-year-olds wearing seemingly identical outfits ─ one Aleksey is described as "friendly, communicative ... respectful towards adults," while the other, Aleksander, is listed as "always polite with adults." Kuleba said he blurred the children's faces for safety.
A separate image provided by Kuleba displayed a search portal in which users could specify the gender, age, hair and eye color of the children they wished to select, while indicating whether they sought an only child or one with siblings.
"It's really horrible," Kuleba said. "It's like a slavery market."
Raymond, executive director of Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab, told OSV News the LPR database was known to exist since at least 2023.
He also clarified that Russian occupation officials in Luhansk mirrored other databases that "commingled" Russian and Ukrainian children, making identification of the layer difficult, until the Yale team developed the means to do so.
"This LPR database has gotten a lot of attention, but it's small in comparison to the potential amount of Ukrainian kids hidden within the three interconnected Russian online platforms," said Raymond. "And those three platforms are Change One Life, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, and ANO TsRSP (the Russian acronym for the Center for Development of Social Projects), which is a quasi-governmental agency that assists in adoption data management."
Throughout the 11 years of its war on Ukraine -- which was launched in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea and military backing of separatists in Donbas and which accelerated in 2022 with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine -- Russia has systematically deported at least 19,546 Ukrainian children, subjecting them to "patriotic re-education" designed to erase their Ukrainian identity, as well as abuse and forced adoption by Russian families.
The actual number of deported children is feared to be far higher, with Russian child commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova -- who, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the forced transfers -- admitting that some 700,000 Ukrainian children were in Russian custody.
Kuleba told OSV News that, counting all Ukrainian children in Russian-occupied territories, the true number of endangered children is some 1.6 million.
Russia's systematic deportation of Ukrainian children -- coordinated by multiple actors, and extensively documented in reports by the Humanitarian Research Lab -- violates several instruments of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Genocide Convention, and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Previously, Raymond -- whose research has informed Vatican-mediated efforts to return the children, and whose funding was slashed this year by Trump administration cuts -- told OSV News the transfers constitute "the largest kidnapping that has happened in 80 years, since World War II."
"I am a Christian, and I believe that it's against God," said Kuleba, referencing Russia's forcible transfer of children. "You hear from Russian authorities, especially from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, that he's fighting for Christian values. It's not true. ... That's why we're calling to all the world, especially the Christian world, to help them (Ukraine's children) survive."
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Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Follow her on X @GinaJesseReina
