Europol and partners from 18 countries have identified information on 45 Ukrainian children forcibly transferred or deported by Russia in the third operation of its kind held at The Hague.
On April 16 and 17, Europol co-hosted a two-day open-source intelligence operation with the Netherlands, bringing together 40 investigators from 18 countries alongside the International Criminal Court and several non-governmental partners. The result: 45 intelligence reports compiled and handed to Ukrainian authorities, each containing leads on the whereabouts of children forcibly removed from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia or Belarus.
What Investigators Found
According to Europol’s press release, the participating open-source intelligence experts compiled reports drawing on publicly available data across multiple categories: transportation routes used during forced relocations, military units that assisted in deportations, directors of children’s orphanages who enabled transfers, individuals who received deported children, camps and facilities where children were taken, and online platforms containing photographs of possibly deported minors.
One finding adds particular urgency to the operation: investigators uncovered evidence suggesting that some deported children may now be serving in Russian military units as part of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
The operation is structured as an “OSINT hackathon” — a format Europol uses to bring researchers together to solve a problem using digital means. Participating countries included Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States. Non-governmental partners included Mnemonic, Global Rights Compliance, Osint for Ukraine and Truth Hounds, alongside the ICC Office of the Prosecutor. This was the third Europol-led event of its kind and the second focused specifically on the forced transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children.
A Fraction of a Much Larger Crisis
The 45 children identified represent a fraction of the scale documented by Ukrainian authorities. Ukraine has recorded the forcible removal of over 19,500 children from occupied territories since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Some have been adopted by Russian nationals; others are held in re-education camps or psychiatric hospitals.
The figure itself is almost certainly incomplete. Ukrainian officials note that some children lost parents during the hostilities and have no remaining relatives in Ukraine able to report them missing, making accurate tracking impossible. More than 2,000 children have been returned to Ukraine to date, but almost every return has required mediation by a third state, with Qatar, South Africa and the Vatican among those facilitating exchanges.
The Legal Framework
The international legal context around these deportations has hardened considerably over the past three years.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. Both are allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia under Articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute. Russia dismissed the warrants, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling them “outrageous and unacceptable”.
Most recently, in March 2026, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russia’s actions constitute not only war crimes but crimes against humanity. The Commission verified 1,205 cases of children deported or forcibly transferred from five Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Kharkiv and Mykolaiv. Four years after the full-scale invasion, 80 per cent of those verified cases remain unresolved, with the children still under Russian control.
Commission chair Erik Møse stated that Russian authorities committed two categories of crimes against humanity: deportation and forcible transfer of children, as well as their enforced disappearance. Commissioner Pablo de Greiff specified that the placements followed “a carefully organised plan” executed “pursuant to a policy conceived and executed under the leadership at the highest level of the Russian Federation state apparatus”.
Russia continues to maintain that children were transferred for their own safety and are available for return under conditions Moscow considers appropriate. The ICC warrants remain unexecuted.
Children as Leverage
The Europol operation comes days after Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha raised the issue directly with Vanessa Frazee, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. At their meeting on April 13, Sybiha stated that Russia is “systematically changing Ukrainian children’s documents, placing them in foster families, including in remote regions of Russia”, and is “attempting to erase their identity by different means”. He added that “Russia is instrumentalising children in this war — using them as leverage in negotiations.”
Sybiha described sustainable peace as “impossible without the return of Ukrainian children home”. The statement reframes what might otherwise appear a purely humanitarian or legal issue: with peace negotiations ongoing, the fate of deported children has become an explicit element of the political process – one Russia, according to Kyiv, is actively exploiting.
Sustained International Effort
Europol’s OSINT hackathon sits within a broader international architecture built around the issue. In 2024, Canada and Ukraine co-founded the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children, which now counts over 40 member countries and organisations. Maksym Maksymov, head of projects at Bring Kids Back Ukraine, told Euronews that sustained international cooperation is essential given the scale of the violations, adding that Ukraine is working with partners both to bring children home and to document the crimes for national and international justice proceedings.
The intelligence gathered during the April operation will be further analysed by Ukrainian authorities as part of their ongoing investigations — investigations that now sit within a legal framework explicitly recognising the deportations as among the gravest crimes under international law and a political context in which their resolution has become inseparable from any credible path to peace.
