Deportation and Russification
The Demographic War Against Ukraine
A Few Figures
A phenomenon often overlooked in public discourse is the vast scale of deportations to the Russian Federation from occupied territories. In 2023, Dmytro Lubinets, Human Rights Commissioner of the Verkhovna Rada, stated that 2.8 million Ukrainians had been deported to Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, while unofficial or semi-official Russian sources estimated the number of “refugees” at around 4.5 million. Of these, between 260,000 and 700,000 are children, and the identities of approximately 19,400 have been confirmed, as documented by Children of War, a platform created by the Ministry for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Information Bureau to monitor the situation of minors deported to the Russian Federation.
The regions receiving the largest number of deported Ukrainians are the oblasts of Rostov, Voronezh, and Belgorod, meaning that most deportations take place to regions bordering Ukraine. However, to facilitate the operation, Russia has established 807 so-called Temporary Accommodation Centers (TACs) across the country; the dispersal of deportees is part of a broader system aimed at hindering people’s return to their homes (for example, Ukrainians attempting to return via the Baltic states are often prevented from entering by Russian border guards). Furthermore, before being taken to Russia, deportees pass through so-called “filtration” points, where documents are typically confiscated and individuals are required to accept Russian temporary residence certificates.
Deportation of Minors
The deportation of Ukrainian children led, on March 17, 2023, to the issuance by the International Criminal Court in The Hague of arrest warrants against the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, and against Vladimir Putin.
Russia employs at least six different methods to transfer Ukrainian children to its territory:
✓ assigning a false medical diagnosis;
✓ transferring children after killing their parents;
✓ direct removal from biological families;
✓ separating a child from their family during filtration procedures;
✓ fostering living conditions unsuitable for minors in the occupied territories, followed by the deceptive proposal to voluntarily send the child on “vacation” or for “rehabilitation,” from which return is not permitted;
✓ transferring entire specialized institutions hosting minors to Russia.
Minors who lose contact with their parents very often become victims of forced adoption by Russian citizens. Some children who have returned to Ukraine report that Temporary Accommodation Centers (TACs) are often visited by the Yunarmiya (“Young Army,” a paramilitary youth movement supported and funded by the Ministry of Defense) and by the Russian Orthodox Church (which carries out propaganda activities in the occupied territories, portraying Ukrainians and Russians as one single people and emphasizing the “salvific” role of Russian policies), subjecting minors to systematic indoctrination. In addition, the Russian military and administration do not allow the evacuation of minors to territories controlled by Ukraine.
Numerous testimonies and independent reports indicate that the conditions of Ukrainian minors forcibly transferred to Russia or to occupied territories are a matter of serious concern. Several children are reported to have been subjected to psychological pressure, forced re-education processes, humiliation related to their national identity, as well as mistreatment and physical punishment for alleged acts of disobedience. So far, Ukraine has managed to bring home 1,985 of the nearly 20,000 children abducted by Russia.
Russia’s overall objective is to provoke a demographic catastrophe in Ukraine while addressing demographic deficits in regions such as Siberia and the Far East. In doing so, forced demographic changes and practices that may amount to genocide are being implemented.
Russification of the Indigenous Population
According to the official data, Russia has placed more than 32,000 Ukrainian citizens, including 8,500 children, in temporary accommodation centres located in remote regions of the country, often transferring them under the pretext of “evacuation”. The main objective of the occupying authorities is to assimilate as many Ukrainians as possible into Russian society and use them as low-cost labor. Since the beginning of the invasion, Russia has planned to increase the number of such facilities to more than 500, as evidenced by the prior expansion of the relevant budget allocation, reaching a total of 950 verified centres in 2024.
Meanwhile, the Russian Federation is pursuing the forced “Russification” of the occupied territories: on the one hand by erasing the national identity of the indigenous population, and on the other by promoting demographic changes through the deportation of residents without Russian passports, to be followed by a mass resettlement program involving Russian, Kazakh, and Belarusian citizens.
The Kremlin has introduced in the occupied Ukrainian territories a new legal status for individuals without a Russian passport, classifying them as “foreigners,” while those who do not obtain a Russian passport risk restrictions in access to essential services, including healthcare and education. At the beginning of 2025, President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia had completed the issuance of passports to residents of the occupied areas, with at least 3.5 million Russian passports issued to Ukrainian citizens. According to a 2025 report by British intelligence, this is intended to make the occupation of Ukrainian territories irreversible. In the occupied territories, residents of areas not controlled by Ukraine who refuse Russian passports become foreign nationals or stateless persons.
At the same time, a total erasure of Ukrainian cultural identity is being implemented in the occupied territories, starting from the school system. In schools in the occupied territory of Luhansk, for example, the head of the military-civil administration of the Luhansk region, Artem Lysogor, circulated a “Dictionary of Key Terms Related to State Policy for the Protection of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values, Culture, and Historical Memory,” so that teachers would educate students accordingly. In School No. 5 in Simferopol, children, under the supervision of military instructors, are forced to produce components for the Russian army (in particular, parts for drones and devices for the rapid reloading of Kalashnikov rifles, which are then officially delivered to Russian military units engaged in combat operations against Ukraine); the occupying Russian administration has not concealed these activities, presenting them as an alleged “volunteer initiative.” The Russian government also launched online courses for teachers aimed at shaping in children from Ukraine a “traditionally Russian identity”; the program included nine modules, with more than five hours devoted to “neo-Nazism” in Ukraine. The course instructed teachers to “instill in children the readiness to live under conditions of a hybrid war by the West against Russia,” but without a direct approach, using “soft influence so that the person begins to perceive your point of view as their own.” Teachers were instructed to “identify children with oppositional attitudes” and those who might be “recruited by foreign intelligence services,” and were advised to tell deported children that their parents had died, even without concrete supporting evidence.
If not halted, these forcibly imposed demographic changes will cause a structural alteration of Ukraine’s demographic composition, resulting in a demographic catastrophe, as well as constituting practices that may amount to genocide. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the forced transfer of civilians from occupied territories under any circumstances. Likewise, the Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees every child the right to identity, family life, nationality, and protection from abduction. On December 3, 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by majority a resolution calling on the Russian Federation to immediately and unconditionally return all Ukrainian children illegally deported (resolution A/RES/ES-11/L.16/Rev.1), following the UN Human Rights Council resolution of April 4, 2023.