Russia says some 700,000 children from the conflict zones in Ukraine have found refuge in the country. The head of the international committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, Grigory Karasin, announced his Telegram messaging channel late on Sunday. The Kremlin claims the move aims to protect orphans and abandoned children from Ukrainian bombing and shelling. The United States accuses Moscow of illegally deporting many of the children.
A new Amnesty International report finds that the Russian government is systematically transferring civilians from occupied areas of Ukraine into Russia. The organization says this “deplorable tactic” amounts to a war crime. Civilians told Amnesty International that they were forcibly transferred to other Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine or into Russia through abusive screening processes — known as ‘filtration’ — that resulted in arbitrary detention and torture, sometimes even against children.
Rescuers pulled another body from the ruins of a restaurant in eastern Ukraine’s city of Kramatorsk, raising to 12 the death toll from a Russian missile strike last week. Three of the victims were children, Reuters reports.
A high-level delegation from Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement, has met with Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma committee on international affairs, and Grigory Karasin, chair of the Federation Council committee on foreign affairs, in Moscow. The two sides discussed the Palestinian situation and regional and international developments.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will appear on the world stage for the first time since the collapse of the mercenary group Wagner this weekend, taking part in a virtual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit on Tuesday, state news agency TASS reported. He will speak from the summit in Beijing, despite Russia’s isolation following the rout of its military campaign to regain control over seized territory.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has left many people without food and subjected millions to a brutal bombardment that has uprooted them from their homes. Many survivors are children who will carry psychological scars long into adulthood.
The United States has warned that any instability in Ukraine could affect the stability of nearby nations, including NATO allies like Turkey. The U.S. has also backed Ukraine’s calls for the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes committed by Russian forces in the country. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday that support for Ukraine would not change if the ICC decided to pursue the case against Russia’s top officials for the invasion and the ensuing war. He added that the United States will work closely with Ukraine and is ready to respond if there are any signs of further Russian aggression. Click here for more on the ICC’s current war crimes investigations in Ukraine. The ICC has open cases against Putin and several other senior Russian officials. Over 2,700 people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes in the nearly five-year war in Ukraine.
