Russia and Belarus are jointly targeting children for removal from Ukraine, coordinating their transport from occupied Ukraine to Russia and onward to Belarus, and subjecting children to re-education, including military training. Belarus’ direct involvement in Russia’s forced deportation of children represents a collaboration between the two regimes on deportation activities conducted by Russia.

Yale HRL has found that at least 2,442 children from Ukraine between the ages of six and 17 have been transported to 13 facilities in Belarus following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Children were transported from at least 17 cities across Ukraine in waves that continued through the date of publication. The movement of children from Ukraine to Belarus, as well as their re-education and military training, has been jointly directed and co-funded by Belarus’ authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka in direct coordination with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Many of the children targeted for deportation to Belarus are members of highly vulnerable populations for which achieving full, free, and meaningful consent is more difficult, including children who are orphans, children with disabilities, children from low-income families, children with military parents, and “adopted children.” This is most clearly demonstrated by Russia’s occupation officials preparing powers of attorney for at least 30 purported orphans to be deported to Belarus. Russia’s officials have also waived requirements for documentation needed for children to cross from Russia-occupied Ukraine into parts of Russia. The context of occupation in which the identification of children takes place is also highly coercive, with frequent incidents of extrajudicial detention and disappearance.

Some of the children documented in this report were identified and recruited for deportation to Belarus by the Investigative Committee, a domestic criminal investigative agency of Russia’s federal government, which may make any consent subject to coercion and therefore unfree. These actions, along with the documented trend of deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia, indicates that the activities captured in this report require urgent review to ensure that consent was properly obtained.

While this report is not a legal analysis of Belarus and Russia’s activities, Yale HRL does conclude that these activities by Belarus and Russia contravene accepted protections for children during armed conflict enshrined in instruments of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) to which both nations are parties.