This week, Save Ukraine publicized the existence of a website from the Government of the [so-called] Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) promoting children listed for adoption, referring to it as “catalog to showcase abducted Ukrainian children.” The following statement from the Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at Yale School of Public Health provides further contextual and factual information regarding the website publicized by Save Ukraine.
Yale HRL’s statement follows:
In 2023, HRL identified an adoption database on the website of the Ministry of Labor and Social Development of the [so-called] Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and transmitted this information to Ukraine’s government upon discovery. HRL believes the LPR's Ministry of Education and Science website presenting children for adoption that was publicized by Save Ukraine earlier this week is based on the same data identified by HRL in 2023. HRL believes that the LPR website may be utilizing the same data as the website identified by HRL in 2023.
HRL has determined Russia’s occupation officials have been operating regional adoption websites in Ukraine since at least as early as 2016. Presently, these websites have the same structure and data fields of children as listed on Russia’s Ministry of Education database, which allows users to sort children by name, region, age, hair color, eye color, gender, health group, and whether the children have siblings. The LPR website publicized by Save Ukraine has the same categories, apart from the ability to filter by region. The websites also use similar descriptive language on the characteristics of children listed for adoption, such as describing children as “obedient” and other terms. HRL has determined that Russia’s Ministry of Education database does not currently list any children from Luhansk for adoption in the Luhansk section of the website. It is also unknown if the children on the LPR website publicized this week are included within Russia's Ministry of Education database, which is known to be the main database used to populate the profiles on the three interconnected Russia-affiliated adoption websites HRL has identified in the past.
Since March 2023, HRL has transmitted profiles of Ukraine’s children from Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea who had appeared in Russian adoption websites as early as 2016 to the Government of Ukraine. In December 2024, HRL released the most comprehensive report to date on Russia’s adoption of Ukraine’s children titled "Intentional, Systematic, & Widespread: Russia’s Program of Coerced Adoption and Fostering of Ukraine’s Children”, which involves the use of websites similar to that of the LPR website.
This report examined three adoption websites operated by or affiliated with Russia’s federal government– including Russia’s primary federal adoption database run by Russia’s Ministry of Education– that listed Ukraine’s children for adoption in various regions of Russia.
Save Ukraine’s publication of LPR’s adoption website may provide additional evidence that supports the legal argument put forth in HRL’s December 2024 report: Russia is forcibly transferring Ukraine's children to Russia and is carrying out the unlawful adoption and fostering of Ukraine’s children. In accordance with international human rights law and international humanitarian law, Ukraine’s children must be returned home.