Ukraine: Forcibly Deported Children

Richard Baker Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Baker (Glenrothes and Mid Fife) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Johanna Baxter) on securing this vital debate, and particularly on her excellent work with the UK Friends of Ukraine on authoring this important but distressing report. I want to focus my remarks on the report’s findings in relation to disabled children. Almost unbelievably, it is disabled children in particular who have been targeted by Russian forces for forcible deportation.

Through my last role with the disability charity Enable I was privileged to meet Raisa Kravchenko, the founder of the VGO Coalition and the mother of a young man with a learning disability in Kyiv, who even in the midst of the invasion has formed an amazing support network for people with learning disabilities and their families. Anyone would find the experience of being in a bomb shelter terrifying, but how much more so for an autistic young person who already struggles with their environment? Of course, for many of the families of disabled children, leaving Ukraine is simply not an option.

I was in contact with Raisa again this week. She told me how the impacts of the invasion are frustrating the work in Ukraine, as they are across Europe, to move disabled children out of institutional care. The issue here is this: Russian forces have targeted care institutions. A disabled child will often be in a care institution and therefore they have been victims of kidnapping. I thought that powerful report brought out the tragic consequences of that.

The consequences were laid bare in the report’s distressing story of Mykola and Anastasiya, two children with autism and cerebral palsy, among 46 children taken by Russian forces from Kherson children’s home and relocated 180 miles away in Simferopol, Crimea. Their parents found the location that their children were in six months later only as a result of an investigation by The New York Times. One can only imagine the trauma they went through. The children were issued with Russian birth certificates, their names were changed, and they were put up for adoption in Russia. Those children must have been under unimaginable stress over that period. Although they were finally reunited with their mother in 2024, Anastasiya, tragically, died from an epileptic seizure shortly after her sixth birthday. Such are the human consequences. These are the horrendous cases that lie behind the grim statistics that my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South shared with us so eloquently. It is important to recognise not only the level of trauma caused to disabled children by such terrifying ordeals, but that they will be affected by them for many years to come.

I will close my remarks by stressing two points. First, there must be accountability. I was privileged to be a member of our delegation to the Council of Europe, which passed resolution 2529 in support of the ICC arrest warrants and calling for parties to the Council of Europe to acknowledge the deportations and transfers of children by Russia as genocide. Secondly, as an international community we need to stand by Ukraine and the children and their families to help them with rehabilitation support. That will not be an easy task, and for disabled children it will require particularly intensive and specialised support. I very much support the recommendation made by my hon. Friend in her vital report. Support from the UK, from our international partners, and indeed the resources from the Trust Fund for Victims, should be utilised for that vital work.

I again congratulate my hon. Friend on all she is doing with the Friends of Ukraine in making a call for action on this horrific crime against Ukraine and its children. Yes, we look to the future for accountability and rehabilitation, but we must do all we can now as a nation, with international partners, to stop the horrendous action by the Russian Government and their forces.