Ukraine’s Deported Children: Resilience, Legal Accountability and Pathways to Recovery
How can Ukraine’s deported children be brought home, helped to recover, and those responsible held accountable? A conference in Stockholm on 18 March 2027 will bring together Ukrainian voices and international experts to examine these questions, including a screening of the documentary After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home.
Organised by the Children at Risk Unit and TF-THB, the conference will bring together representatives of CBSS Member States and Observer States, including Stockholm-based diplomatic missions, members of the CBSS EG CAR and TF-THB networks, representatives of international organisations, as well as experts and practitioners working on the issue.
The day moves from the facts to the response. It opens with the scale and evidence of the deportations, then looks at how deportation works as a feature of Russian control over occupied territory and at international law and accountability. After lunch it turns to how children are located and returned, a screening of the documentary After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home, which tells the stories of children who have returned home, and two sessions on recovery: what happens when a child comes home, and what good practice looks like.
Registration
Registration opens in the second half of November.
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Speakers include
- H.E. Svitlana Zalishchuk, Ambassador of Ukraine to Sweden
- Dr Andreas Umland, Policy Fellow, European Policy Institute, Kyiv
- Dr Jade McGlynn, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London
- Maksym Maksymov, Head of Bring Kids Back UA
- Dr Paola Cardenas, Head of Barnahus Iceland and Assistant Professor, University of Iceland
- Save Ukraine- presenter to be announced
Directed by Sarah McCarthy, 2024, United Kingdom, Ukraine, 56 minutes (conference version)
The documentary follows Ukrainian children who were deported to Russia and later brought home by their families. Families gather at an animal-therapy retreat in a forest by the Baltic Sea, in Karepa, Estonia, organised by the Estonian Association of Assistance and Therapy Dogs. With the help of counsellors, therapy dogs and horses, the children begin to talk about what happened to them, and their families describe the efforts it took to bring them back. Among those the film follows are Veronika Vlasova, who was taken to Russia and spent over a year in an orphanage, and Sasha Mezhevoy, who was separated from family at an army checkpoint during the invasion of Mariupol and threatened with forced adoption into a Russian family.
Where it has been shown:
- World premiere at DOC NYC, 2024
- UK Parliament, 2024
- European Parliament Info Hub, Brussels, 2025
- Several other international screenings
Russia has deported and forcibly transferred Ukrainian children as part of its illegal, unjustified and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine. In the Sopot Declaration, the Council “expressed its commitment to supporting the tracing, return and reintegration of Ukrainian children unlawfully deported and forcibly transferred by Russia, ensuring accountability for these crimes, as well as legal evaluation of the indoctrination of children in occupied territories.” This conference puts that commitment into practice by bringing together the evidence, the law and the recovery work in one day, with Ukrainian speakers at its centre.
It is an initiative of the CBSS Secretariat, organised under the Icelandic Presidency, which places resilience at the core of its agenda and stresses continued support for Ukraine. It also builds on the work of two CBSS bodies. The Expert Group on Children at Risk (EG CAR) works under its 2025-2030 strategy for a region where all children can grow, develop and thrive free from all forms of violence, and promotes the rights of child victims and witnesses of violence to justice, protection and healing. The Task Force against Trafficking in Human Beings (TF-THB) works under its 2025-2030 strategy on protecting highly vulnerable groups, including children, and on trafficking risks in migration linked to war and conflict. The conference keeps this issue on the regional agenda and supports Ukraine’s efforts to find and return its children by bringing Ukrainian voices and international experts together with embassy representatives, experts from the region.