Feedback A roundup of news from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG), one of the oldest human rights organizations in Ukraine. Since 2014, KHPG has been documenting war crimes in eastern Ukraine, and since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has been documenting events that show signs of crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes) across all regions of Ukraine. KHPG is one of the founders of the T4P (Tribunal for Putin) initiative, which brings together more than two dozen organizations with the aim of holding Russia accountable for the crimes committed.
Russia’s deportation and enforced disappearances of Ukrainian children are crimes against humanity – UN Commission
In March 2026, for the 61st session of the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine released a report on crimes and violations committed during the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, along with a separate document “I am still looking for my daughter”: crimes against humanity committed by Russian authorities against children from
Ukraine dedicated to the deportation, transfer, and enforced disappearances of Ukrainian children.
According to the Commission, Russian authorities have deported and forcibly transferred at least 1,205 Ukrainian children from occupied territories. 80% of these children have not yet been returned. The transfers investigated by the Commission were not temporary; on the contrary, Russian authorities at the highest levels coordinated actions aimed at facilitating the long-term placement of children in the Russian Federation. Initially, children were placed in temporary transit centers in Russia or in Russian-occupied territories, after which they were transferred to 21 regions of Russia and placed for an indefinite period either in families or in institutions. In violation of international humanitarian law and international legal norms, the children were granted Russian citizenship, and their profiles appeared in databases for adoption or foster placement, the Commission noted.
The Commission also stated that Russian authorities systematically failed to inform parents, legal guardians, or Ukrainian authorities about the fate and whereabouts of the removed children. For months or even years after the forced transfer, people often did not know what had happened to their children, their legal status, or where they were located. This led to prolonged family separation and became a traumatic experience both for the children and their relatives. Russia has not established a system that would facilitate the return of the children. Minors, their parents, and relatives were forced to search for one another independently. The Commission considers such actions to constitute a war crime in the form of the unjustified delay in the repatriation of civilians. It also reiterates that the deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children by Russia amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- Read the article Russia’s deportation and enforced disappearances of Ukrainian children are crimes against humanity – UN Commission
Children abducted from occupied Ukraine ‘offered’ on state adoption site in Russia
A few weeks after the publication of the report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, investigative journalists from RFE/RL’s Current Time, together with the Reckoning Project, found the names and photographs of four children in a Russian state adoption database. These children had been abducted back in 2022 from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home when Kherson was under Russian occupation. The children are being offered for adoption, with no mention anywhere that they are from Ukraine or that they were forcibly taken to Russia.
Russia is increasing the number of cadet classes in temporarily occupied areas of Kherson region
The article analyzes how the education system in territories temporarily occupied by Russia is increasingly being transformed into a militarized propaganda system. The Center for National Resistance believes that in this way Russia is creating a closed militarized system in which schoolchildren living under occupation may later join the law enforcement or military structures of the aggressor state.
- Read in Ukrainian Росія збільшує кількість кадетських класів на ТОТ Херсонщини
Voices of War video project: “A Museum of Childhood in Unchildlike Times”
Valery Leiko, founder of the Kharkiv “Museum of Childhood,” talks about the museum’s work during the war—supporting children in bomb shelters, its exhibits, and efforts to preserve the joy of childhood under the most horrific conditions.
- Read the article A Museum of Childhood in Unchildlike Times
Ukrainian Women in Captivity: Thoughts about Their Families Help Them to Survive — interview with Tamila Bespala, head of the KHPG Kharkiv office, about Ukrainian women in Russian captivity and assistance after their return home
According to the director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, Evhen Zakharov, at least 30 female military personnel and about three hundred civilian Ukrainian women are currently in Russian captivity. Lawyers of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group provide legal assistance in 127 cases involving women, both prisoners (72 of whom are in the KHPG database) and those who have already returned home. Almost all who survived captivity testify to poor conditions of detention, beatings, and torture. In addition, our lawyers are working on 108 cases related to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), involving both women and men.
The Russians are holding Ukrainian female prisoners in various places of detention, both in the occupied territory and in the Russian Federation. Since 2014, they have been taken, among others, to the Donetsk SIZO and “Izolyatsia” [solitary confinement]. In the first years of the full-scale invasion, many female prisoners of war passed through the women’s colony in Mariupol, Olenivka. Civilian residents of the occupied territories ended up in numerous unofficial places of detention—torture, from where they were either released or taken further, for example, to the Belgorod SIZO and further, deep into Russia. In addition, at various times, KHPG clients were or are still in pre-trial detention centers in Taganrog and Valuyki, and in correctional colonies in Kursk, Malaya Lokna (Kursk region), Borisoglebsk (Voronezh region), etc.
— Cases involving prisoners come in groups to us, — says Tamila Bespala. — You take on the case of a servicewoman who returned from captivity and was tortured there. You start looking for witnesses to the crime, and in the process, it turns out that the women who were in captivity with her were also tortured.
A farce instead of a fair trial: UN Commission investigates how Russia is trying Ukrainian prisoners of war
KHPG summarizes the Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine.
The Commission has investigated the conduct of trials by Russian Federation courts in the context of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Commission focused on a sample of 72 trials by four courts in the Russian Federation and eight “courts” in Russian occupied territories of Ukraine, concerning 68 civilians and 60 prisoners of war from Ukraine. These included men and women aged 18 to 74, as well as three 16-year-old boys and one 17-year-old girl.
The accused were charged under Russian criminal law, mostly for crimes related to terrorism, espionage, violent seizure of power and sentenced to imprisonment ranging from eight to 25 years, or life imprisonment.
During the pre-trial investigations and the trials themselves, as well as after the verdicts, Russian authorities committed a wide range of crimes and violations. The accused were held in detention facilities where the Commission previously established extensive use of torture. Russian authorities subjected them to unlawful confinement, deportation or transfer to detention facilities in the Russian Federation or in Russian occupied areas of Ukraine, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence including rape, ill-treatment, and inhuman or degrading treatment.
In these cases, the Commission found that the courts have violated fair trial guarantees set out in international human rights law and international humanitarian law, notably the principles of the presumption of innocence, the non-retroactivity of laws, the right not to be compelled to testify against themselves or to confess guilt, and the right to be judged by an independent and impartial tribunal.
The UN pointed to the systemic nature of the crimes and violations committed by Russia during pre-trial investigations and court proceedings. “The recurrence and open commission of these violations for four years, and their wide public coverage, demonstrates that this modus operandi is commonly accepted by the Russian Government. This raises serious concern for the fate of civilians and prisoners of war already convicted, and for those awaiting trial in Russian courts,” the report states.