Kateryna Rashevska can trace exactly how one Ukrainian child disappears into Russia: the occupied-territory orphanage, the foster placement with a Kremlin-connected family, the re-education camp, the military uniform, the draft notice that arrives at sixteen. A legal expert at Ukraine's Regional Center for Human Rights, she has filed submissions to the International Criminal Court, documented the cases behind recent EU sanctions, and spent years building the argument that this is not only a war crime but genocide.

The law, she says, is ready. In less than five years of war, Russia has forcibly transferred at least 20,651 Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine, a crime that has already put President Vladimir Putin and his children's-rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova in the dock of the ICC. The 1948 Genocide Convention lists the forcible transfer of children as one of the acts that constitute genocide, and the ICC's Ukraine investigation has been mandated to examine the charge since 2022. More than 150 states have signed that convention. None has been willing to say the word about Russia.

"We don't need to change any legal framework," Rashevska says. "We simply still lack the political will to call the crimes by their proper names." She presses the point because, for her, justice is not an afterthought but a deterrent: "Without justice, Russia will feel this resentment in several years, and they will repeat their actions."

And the court that could deliver that justice is collapsing. The ICC is in the deepest crisis of its existence: its prosecutor, Karim Khan, removed, 13 of its judges and prosecutors sanctioned by the United States, and on 9 October 2026 the court itself sanctioned by Washington for the first time, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowing to dismantle it "brick by brick." The court called the move unprecedented and warned that "history will judge this moment."

Meanwhile the children remain. Of the more than 20,000 taken, only 2,665 have been returned, as of 7 October 2026. The rest are placed in Russia's adoption system and foster homes, taught to forget they are Ukrainian, to love Russia, and to be willing to die for it: Rashevska cites 344,000 Ukrainian children drawn into the Movement of the First and 55,000 into the Yunarmiya youth army.

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The link links to an interview with legal expert Kateryna Rashevska.

We don’t need to change any legal frameworks to prosecute what the Russians are doing with Ukrainian children. Militarization and political indoctrination, as well as Russification of young Ukrainians, is a part of Russia’s bigger strategy to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state and to subjugate everything in the Ukrainian nation to the Russian influence and control. I don’t see legal problems; we simply still lack the political will to call the crimes by their proper names.

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