Ukraine Solidarity Network (US)
INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’s DAY is June 1 in Ukraine, Russia, and 47 other countries. This Children’s Day, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls for the freedom and return of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has kidnapped and for ending the mass starvation of millions of children in Palestine, Sudan, and other sites of widespread child hunger such as Haiti, South Sudan, and Mali.
* Kremlin documents dated a week before the full scale invasion on February 18, 2022 detail plans to abduct Ukrainian children and bring them to Russia under the guise of “humanitarian evacuations.”
* Ukraine has verified Russia’s deportation of 19,456 children to date, but Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab places the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.
* Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, are under indictment by the International Criminal Court for abducting children. Russia says it “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023.
* Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has documented 43 Russian children’s camps housing deported children: at least 32 are explicitly for “re-education.” Ukrainian children are indoctrinated, punished for Ukrainian language and culture and forced to participate in “military-patriotic” training courses.
* Abducted teenage Ukrainian boys forced to accept Russian citizenship face conscription into the Russian army to fight against their fellow Ukrainians. Trump has cut funding for a program that tracks abducted Ukrainian children, and DOGE may have permanently deleted a database with crucial information.
* A negotiated outcome to the war on terms other than Ukraine’s will result in an irreversible loss of Ukraine’s children and its future and irreversible harm to the children.
Russia’s war against the children of Ukraine joins the war against Palestinian children being conducted by the Zionist regime of Israel, with the full support of the Trump regime in the USA, as a ghastly crime against children and humanity.
* As of this writing, every child in Gaza is severely undernourished and facing imminent death by starvation due to Israel’s having prohibited entry of food, water, and other necessities into Gaza.
* According to the UN, at least 100 children have been killed or injured every day in Gaza since Israeli strikes resumed on March 18, even as the United States underscores continued support for Israel.
* From October 2023 to Palestine Children’s Day on April 5, the Palestinian Ministry of Education on Saturday said more than 17,000 children had been killed in Gaza, about 1,100 children had been detained by the Israeli army, and about 39,000 others had lost one or both parents.
* Israel detained 1,200 Palestinian children from the occupied West Bank in the same period.
* More than 9,500 Palestinians including women and over 350 children are currently held in Israeli prisons under harsh conditions.
* Since October 2023, around 1.9 million people – including thousands of children – have gone through repeated forced displacement amid bombardment, fear, and loss according to UNRWA.
* Israel has killed more than 61,700 Palestinians and wounded 118,366 in Gaza since October 2023, most of them women and children. Thousands of others missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
* The atrocities that Palestinian children have undergone since October 2023 are but a continuation of decades of deprivation and attacks by Israel.
Sadly, the horrific civil war in Sudan may have even deadlier results than either Russia’s war against Ukraine or Israel’s war against Palestine.
* Sudan is becoming the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history as the ongoing protracted famine puts hundreds of thousands at imminent risk of death. 24.6 million people are acutely food insecure and 638,000 face catastrophic levels of hunger.
* Over 1 in 3 children face acute malnutrition.
* 12.5 million people have been forced from their homes.
* The World Food Program (WFP) is supporting over 3 million Sudanese people each month, but the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid will cause radical cuts in this aid. WFP spent $9.8 billion on aid last year, and nearly half of the funds were contributed by the United States. This year, it’s facing a projected 40% reduction in funding. Israel must immediately end its blockade and its war on Palestine!
All U.S. medical and food aid for children and others in Sudan and everywhere else must be immediately restored!
The Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on the U.S. government and the international community to insist that Russia adhere to international law and return Ukrainian children to Ukraine and to sanction Israel diplomatically, economically, and militarily until its food blockade of Gaza is lifted. We also call on the US government to restore its funding to the World Food Program to feed hungry children in Sudan and other famine areas.
We call on the United States and European nations to cease providing weapons and other help to Israel’s war on Palestinian children and adults and send military aid to Ukraine for its self-defense.
Ukraine Solidarity Network (US). May 25, 2025
NOTE: Since the Ukraine Solidarity Network statement was posted in late May, the children of Gaza and Sudan are still getting bombs, not food.
The prospects for abducted Ukrainian children have taken turns for the worse. Euromaidan Press reported in June that Russia had proposed exchanging abducted Ukrainian children for Russian POWs. Deputy Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, Farhan Haq, condemned the proposal: “Obviously, all innocent civilians, including innocent children, should not be used as bargaining chips.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy castigated the proposal as “beyond understanding and beyond the bounds of international law.”
Meanwhile, the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, the only entity in the world outside the resource-constrained Ukrainian government that is tracking the abducted children, is fighting for its life. In a July 8 interview with the daily podcast Ukraine: The Latest, Nathanial Raymond, the director of the Lab, described its work and its fight for funding to continue its work. The Trump administration cut of the federal government’s funding of the Lab when it came into office. Congressional objections have been to no avail.
The UK government of Keir Starmer said no to funding. The EU has been dithering for months with no answer. Yale University could cover Lab’s $5 million annual budget out its $40+ billion endowment without noticing the difference, but it won’t. The Lab is extending its work through online donations in order to organize and pass on its data to the Ukrainian government, but it does not expect to be able work past October unless a major funder steps up.
The Lab’s staff has been able to scour online Russian records and other Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) as well access classified satellite images to identify and locate over 35,000 abducted children. It has provided its data to the Ukrainian government and the International Criminal Court, which led to the arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his children’s minister, Maria Llova-Belova, for war crimes related to the unlawful deportation and coercive Russification of Ukrainian children. Raymond notes in his interview that the Lab’s $5 million annual budget to investigate tens of thousands of child abductions is nothing compared to what is spent on domestic child abduction cases or the 18-year, $250 million investigation to document the fate of those who went missing after the attack on the World Trade Center.
In addition to the child kidnapping documentation, the Lab has also worked on other war crimes investigations at the request of the US Department of Justice and the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. The Trump administration has shut down all investigations across all U.S. agencies into Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
War crimes can take decades to prosecute. But as I heard Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian human rights lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 with her organization Centre for Civil Liberties, say in an online discussion of the abducted Ukrainian children, childhood doesn’t wait for long war crimes investigations. Children grow up quickly. They need to be returned to Ukraine now to prevent more permanent damage.
The same goes for the starving children of Gaza and Ukraine. They need food now.
The collapse of international humanitarian aid, including the grossly underfunded World Food Program, has been led by the United States, which until Trump was the largest funder of such programs by far. These programs could be fully funded with a small fraction of the U.S. military budget alone. It would be a better security investment than more militarism. It would make friends, not enemies, for the United States.