Russian forces have tortured 75 Ukrainian children – prosecutor general’s office

During the full-scale war, 75 Ukrainian children were tortured by the Russian invaders, most of them in the village of Yahidne, Ukraine's northern Chernihiv region.

Yulia Usenko, head of the Department for the Protection of Children's Interests and Anti-Violence of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, said this in an interview with the Interfax-Ukraine agency.

"Today, pretrial investigation bodies and prosecutors document such crimes in more than 3,200 criminal proceedings," she said. "Among them are murders, mutilations, abduction of children, forced displacement, deportation, sexual violence against children, attacks on institutions and institutions for children." 

As the Department for the Protection of Children's Interests head noted, 75 children suffered from torture.

"Of them, 69 are in Yahidne, Chernihiv region [during the Russian occupation in March 2022]. The conditions in which the children were kept together with adults in the basement of the school, the treatment of them, are tantamount to torture," she stressed.

As Usenko said, prosecutors recorded isolated cases in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions when children were deprived of their liberty and tortured together with adults.

Usenko added that the children suffered because the occupiers thought they could transmit information about the movement of Russian equipment and information that may adjust the fire of the Ukrainian forces.

Reports of torture were received already after the liberation of the territories: most cases of sexual violence, 13 of them have been recorded to date. They were also established after de-occupation,

Background

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia, 1,620 children have been injured, including 503 minors who have been killed; 1,117 have received injuries of various severity.

As of August 29, juvenile prosecutors emphasize that they have already found 16,820 missing children. The prosecutor's office considers 1,167 minors to be missing.

The department emphasized that 19,546 children were abducted to Russia and the so-called republics, of which only 386 minors were returned home.

As Rubryka reported, another child was returned from the temporarily occupied territory of the Kherson region with the participation of the Ministry of Reintegration.