What about refugee children from Donbass?

Excerpt from Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova’s interview with Vedomosti newspaper

More than 190,000 children had arrived in Russia from Donbass by early May, including about 1,200 coming from orphanages in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Quite often, these children suffer from disabilities, and have several brothers and sisters.

One of the main challenges faced by Russian government institutions in charge of processing these refugees is finding the children’s relatives. In fact, families can be scattered around Ukraine, Russia and other neighbouring countries.

Finding a home for these children in the Russian Federation is another issue. For now, giving Russian families temporary custody of these children is the only way to do this. However, this framework fails to live up to the needs of these children. What they need is Russian citizenship, which would not only allow them to be placed permanently with families, but also guarantee them access to a safety net, including benefits, healthcare and rehabilitation, as well as stays at wellness resorts.

At the same time, many Russians have stepped forward saying that they are ready to take these children. There is a lack of awareness of who these children from Donbass are. People tend to think that they lost their parents during hostilities, while in fact they are mostly social orphans.

The DPR and LPR leadership has already given a political green light to streamlining the placement of these children with Russian families. In particular, Russia, the DPR and the LPR are currently drafting agreements on child custody, guardianship and adoption. This will be followed by an effort to amend the laws of the two people’s republics to enable Russian nationals to adopt children from these territories or take custody over them. The fact of the matter is that most of them are LPR or DPR citizens, since they were born after 2014. Still, some are Ukrainian citizens, even though these cases are quite rare. All these children will retain their DPR or LPR citizenship when they become Russian nationals.

In addition, we will set up operational headquarters in the form of contact groups bringing together DPR, LPR and Russia’s officials, as well as legislators and experts from the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Education. The Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights will head these headquarters, with the children’s rights commissioners from the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics acting as co-chairs. These contact groups will focus on harmonising laws.

Efforts are underway to draft agreements on who controls what and how. What kind of oversight will be needed to control property belonging to these children, and how will it be implemented? Today, it is the DPR’s State Service for Family and Child Affairs and Moscow Region’s Social Development Ministry that oversee the living conditions for children placed into families under temporary custody arrangements. One possible option is that the republics could open consulates in order to exercise this kind of control.

There is an agreement with Moscow and St Petersburg enabling their specialists – psychologists, teachers and psychiatrists – to visit regions where the Donbass children are staying. The primary focus will be on children from social childcare institutions in cases where we cannot find their legal caregivers. They need help to deal with their trauma and to benefit from structured rehabilitation programmes. Once the legal formalities are settled, we can move on to figuring out the family profile that would suit each of these children best.

We launched the In Children’s Hands campaign, which is aimed at providing targeted support. Three trucks carrying 20 tonnes of humanitarian aid are already on their way to Donbass, while the temporary shelters are getting what they need in order to set up children-friendly spaces.

From day one, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights and the Emergencies Ministry have kept an eye on how these children are being received, monitoring assistance, helping them enrol in schools and offering advice.