(OSV News) - The Vatican can take three key steps to provide greater assistance than it already has in securing the return of Ukrainian children forcibly taken by Russia, a Ukrainian child advocate and former government official told OSV News.
"The Holy See could play a unique and very important role as an intermediary beyond the one it has played so far," said Mykola Kuleba, founder of Save Ukraine, which since 2014 -- when Russia initiated its current attacks on Ukraine -- has worked to rescue abducted Ukrainian children and provide humanitarian support to families.
Throughout the 11 years of the war, which accelerated in 2022 with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has systematically deported at least 19,546 Ukrainian children, subjecting them to "patriotic re-education" designed to erase their Ukrainian identity, as well as abuse and forced adoption by Russian families.
Some have been drafted into the Russian army upon reaching the age of 18. Among the seven children Kuleba recently rescued was an orphan named Serhii, who last year at age 17 received a draft notice informing him to report to the Russian army immediately upon his 18th birthday.
The actual number of deported children is feared to be far higher, with Russian child commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova -- who along with Russian President Vladimir Putin is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the forced transfers -- admitting that some 700,000 Ukrainian children were in Russian custody.
The systematic deportation -- coordinated by multiple actors, and extensively documented in reports by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab -- violates several instruments of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Genocide Convention, and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and president of the Italian bishops' conference, as papal envoy to Russia and Ukraine, with the cardinal traveling to both nations in 2023 to address the issue and other humanitarian concerns amid the war.
In April, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Rome for Pope Francis' funeral, met with Cardinal Zuppi, thanking him for the Vatican's assistance and stressing the critical need for further support.
"There are still very many children who are being held against their will in the territory of Russia," Zelenskyy told the cardinal. "We want to bring them home, and that is why we are once again turning to the Vatican for such help."
Kuleba told OSV News that as part of its expanded intervention in the matter, the Vatican "could directly request information from Moscow to identify and locate those forcibly removed children or abducted children who are now registered as Russians."
"They were adopted or come from territories considered Russian (by Russia)," Kuleba explained. "That is why they (Russia) claim that they have no Ukrainian minors, although two years ago, Russia claimed to have registered more than 700,000. To this day, we still have no information about who they are, what territories they come from, whether they have parents or whether they are unaccompanied."
Secondly, he said, "church representatives could communicate with the children and clarify their circumstances, and … cooperate with the Russian authorities to have them accept their (the children's) repatriation."
"The Vatican has great influence as a moral authority and (as a) neutral mediator," said Kuleba. "It can continue to publicly raise the issue on international forums supporting Cardinal Zuppi's diplomatic negotiations."
Kuleba said a third crucial step by the Vatican would be to advocate for religious freedom in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, where officials have cracked down on all faiths except Moscow-facing Orthodox communities.
"Many Catholic and Protestant churches are under huge persecution in occupied territories," he said. "These churches really need the Vatican's protection. They need the Vatican to help to protect their religious freedom."
Safeguarding both religious freedom and basic human rights in Ukraine's Russian-occupied territories is essential, said Kuleba, since children in those areas are "every day … in huge danger" under a "totalitarian regime."
In fact, said Kuleba, some 1.6 million Ukrainian children are "under serious and imminent threat due to Russia seizing territories" that account for "20% of Ukraine's population of children."
With parents detained, injured or killed, those children are defenseless, said Kuleba.
"We cannot talk about children's rights anymore in (the) occupied territories (of Ukraine) and in Russia," he said. "They have no rights and they have no possible way to inform about the violation of their rights, because nobody has access to their territories. And that's why we even cannot receive information about these kids, about their condition of life, about their rights, about their families, about if they need something. That's why we can't speak about rights, because they have no rights."
Caption: A woman holds a child next to a destroyed bridge during evacuation from Irpin, Ukraine, March 28, 2022, as Russia continues its attack on the country. (OSV News photo/Oleksandr Ratushniak, Reuters)
