On Thursday, June 1, Children’s Day, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center expresses its support to all children affected by the occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation in 2022. The CTRC team hopes and is doing everything possible to ensure that in the near future all children had the opportunity to truly enjoy every day of childhood.
Unfortunately, the Russian Federation has already broken the lives of tens of thousands of children, because the occupation of Crimea equally affected both the fate of adults and children. The Crimean Tatar Resource Center spoke about this more than once and dedicated the film Give Me Back My Dad! to this topic, which tells the stories of children whose parents were imprisoned or forcibly kidnapped after the occupation of the peninsula.
But in fact, there are much more categories of children affected by the occupation of Crimea:
– 15 children tragically died;
– 1 infant was separated from mother;
– dozens of children have suffered because of the murder and enforced disappearance of their parents;
– tens of thousands of children are deprived of the right to study their native (Crimean Tatar or Ukrainian) languages in the occupied Crimea;
– tens of thousands of children suffered from ecocide in the occupied Crimea;
– hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children from the mainland of Ukraine are deprived of the right to health improvement and medical rehabilitation in children’s health centers and children’s specialized sanatoriums in Crimea;
– thousands of children became forced migrants, thus deprived of the right to live in their homeland in the national community;
– tens of thousands of children who have become victims of the militarization of the educational process, in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article IV of the Geneva Convention, 51, which prohibits the promotion of military service by the occupying power among the civilian population. Russia forms in the minds of Crimean children a cult of war, service in the Russian army, a cult of violence and hatred;
– thousands of children become victims of inciting ethnic hatred and racial intolerance;
– thousands of children from orphanages are deprived of the right to obtain Ukrainian citizenship and move to the mainland of Ukraine;
– tens of thousands of children are limited in their right to receive education in Ukrainian universities.
And since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine, the number of affected children has increased significantly. Thus, 1,466 children suffered as a result of Russia’s armed aggression. According to UNICEF, more than 2 million Ukrainian children have crossed the border of neighboring countries as refugees, and 3 million are now internally displaced persons in Ukraine. And thousands of children were forcibly taken from Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation.
The Russian Federation took away childhood from millions of children.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center believes that the Ukrainian and international communities should join forces to protect the rights of children affected by the occupation of Crimea and the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in the near future. The Crimean Tatar Resource Center, for its part, will make every effort so that as many people as possible in the world can learn about the children who have suffered because of the crimes of Russia.
Indeed, we have successful results of our work. On March 17, 2023, the Pre-trial Chamber II issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, who is the presidential commissioner for children. This decision is also the result of the work of the CTRC. After all, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, the organization has been monitoring and collecting information about children from the newly occupied territories of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and systematically communicates with the investigators of the International Criminal Court.
We continue to work further.
Children should live, not die.