(ANSA) - STRASBOURG, APRIL 27 - To date, "361 minors have returned to Ukraine, but 19,390 are still being held in Russia, and this number does not include those in the occupied territories. We ask the world not only to worry about the fate of our children, but to offer all the help he can".
This is the appeal that the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, made to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe as she intervened in the debate on the report on the deportation and forced transfer of minors and other Ukrainian civilians to Russia and the occupied territories.
The first lady, connected by video, brought to the courtroom the stories of several children abducted from Moscow.
"Evgen - he said - was in Mariupol with his three children. When he was imprisoned by the Russians after the so-called process of infiltration, his children were transferred to an orphanage in Russia and were found just a day before being sent to adoption".
And then again the story of a 12-year-old boy whom the Russians separated from his mother and then tell him that the woman had abandoned him, and that of a girl of the same age brought to Donetsk after her father, with whom she was staying, had been killed by a bomb.
"The evidence gathered on the deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia or the territories it is occupying shows that these practices amount to the crime of genocide," says the assembly of the Council of Europe in a unanimously voted report asking Moscow immediately and unconditionally cease what it is doing to Ukrainian minors.
According to the assembly "the organized and systematic nature of the practices adopted by Moscow, the fact that they have similar characteristics in the different occupied regions but also over time lead to the conclusion that the intention is to destroy Ukraine, Ukrainian identity and cultural characteristics and linguistics of his people".
(HANDLE).