Russia tried to fold abducted Ukrainian children into prisoner exchange lists, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha disclosed on 11 May, formally ruling out any framework that would treat kidnapped children as bargaining chips in peace negotiations.
Kyiv had been warning for weeks that Russia was using deported children as leverage. On Monday, Sybiha said how: Moscow wanted them on prisoner-exchange lists. The European Council counts more than 20,000 Ukrainian children taken since the full-scale invasion. About 2,000 are home—none through the international mechanisms built for this.
"There has been much speculation. Today I want to state this officially: the fate of Ukrainian children will never be subject to any compromises," Sybiha told the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children in Brussels.
"Russia has already proposed including children in exchange lists. But this is unacceptable. Children's freedom is unconditional."
"When we talk about really returned children, certain countries helped—Qatar, the US, the Holy See, some others, including those present in this room," he said. "Our special services and state institutions worked." International instruments, he added, did not.
Sybiha drew historical parallels
Abducted, renamed, adopted: How Russia systematically erased 20,000 Ukrainian children
He quoted two children eighty years apart. Borys Romanchenko, sixteen, taken from a Sumy-region village to Germany in 1942: "They just took us—and you no longer belong to anyone." A boy from Mariupol after Russian occupation forces took him: "They just took us and told us we belonged to no one."
Romanchenko survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald. A Russian missile killed him in his Kharkiv apartment in March 2022. He was 96.
In Belgium, Sybiha noted, the Dossin barracks—the deportation point before Auschwitz—is remembered, as is the wartime attack on the Twentieth Convoy, a rare act that stopped a forced deportation. "Today we must stop this convoy again," he said.
Russia wants the topic off the agenda
"Russians are afraid of this topic," Sybiha said. "They are trying to downplay its significance. They demand it be removed from the agenda. They understand they are committing a crime and are afraid of justice."
The crime is not abstract. Russian occupation authorities have built an online catalogue of Ukrainian children offered for adoption, filterable by age, gender, eye and hair color, and personality—with some labelled "obedient" or "calm," Euronews documented. Most have had their identities and papers changed. UN investigators have classified the practice as a crime against humanity.
The EU acted on the same day
The European Commission announced approximately $54 million to support tracing, return and reintegration. The Foreign Affairs Council sanctioned 16 individuals and seven entities involved in the abduction system, including camp directors, institutions linked to Russia's Ministry of Education, and military officers running youth training. Among the named: Lilya Shvetsova, who runs the "Red Carnation" camp in occupied Crimea, where the EU said she supervised "activities aimed at shaping the political and ideological views" of Ukrainian children.
Panama, Switzerland and Cyprus joined the coalition this week, bringing it to 46 countries and three international organizations. Co-chairs from Ukraine, Canada and the EU pressed for the enforcement of ICC arrest warrants against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children's commissioner who is the architect of the program.
Monday's results: $54 million in EU funds, 16 individuals sanctioned, three new countries in the coalition. The roughly 18,000 children still inside Russia stayed where they were.
