On Sunday, September 1, the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre congratulates everyone on the start of the school year and expresses its support to all children who, due to the full-scale war in Ukraine, are forced to celebrate this day in another city, country or in occupation.
Unfortunately, the Russian Federation has already broken the lives of tens of thousands of children, as the occupation of Crimea has equally affected both adults and children. The Crimean Tatar Resource Centre has told about this many times and has dedicated the film ‘Bring Back My Dad’ to this topic, telling the story of children whose parents were imprisoned or forcibly abducted after the occupation of the peninsula.
But in reality, the categories of children affected by the occupation of Crimea are much larger:
– 15 children tragically died;
– 1 infant child was separated from his mother;
– dozens of children have suffered due to the murder and enforced disappearance of their fathers;
– tens of thousands of children deprived of the right to learn their native (Crimean Tatar or Ukrainian) languages in the occupied Crimea;
– tens of thousands of children have suffered ecocide in the occupied Crimea;
– hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children from mainland Ukraine have been deprived of the right to health improvement and medical rehabilitation in children’s health centres and children’s specialised sanatoria in Crimea;
– Thousands of children have become internally displaced persons, thus deprived of the right to live in their homeland in the national community;
– tens of thousands of children have become victims of militarisation of the educational process, in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and 51 Article IV of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits propaganda of service in the army of the occupying state among the civilian population. russia forms in the minds of Crimean children the cult of war, service in the russian army, the cult of violence and hatred;
– Thousands of children are victims of incitement of interethnic hatred and racial intolerance;
– Thousands of children from orphanages are deprived of the right to obtain Ukrainian citizenship and move to mainland Ukraine;
– tens of thousands of children are restricted in their right to receive education in Ukraine’s higher education institutions.
And since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the number of children affected has increased significantly. Thus, 550 children have already died as a result of Russia’s armed aggression, and more than 1,364 have suffered. Millions of Ukrainian children have crossed the borders of neighbouring countries as refugees, and the same number of children are now internally displaced within Ukraine.
The Russian Federation has taken childhood away from millions of children.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Centre believes that the Ukrainian and international community must join efforts to protect the rights of children affected by the occupation of Crimea and the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in the near future. For its part, the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre will make every effort to make as many people in the world as possible aware of the children affected by Russian crimes.
And indeed, we have had successful results of our work. On 17 March 2023, Pre-Trial Chamber II issued arrest warrants for rf President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, who is the rf Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Affairs. This decision is also a result of the work of the CTRC. The organization has been monitoring and collecting information on children from the newly occupied territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has been communicating systematically with the investigators of the International Criminal Court.
We continue to work further.
Children should live, not die.