The European Union (EU), as part of a new package of sanctions, will blacklist Ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova, Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Moscow Region Vyacheslav Dukhin and Minister of Family, Labor and Social Protection of Bashkortostan Lenara Ivanova due to the organization of mass abductions by Russia of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories. It is reported by EUobserver. There are 59 more people on the list, including deputy ministers, deputies, senators, prosecutors, military leaders and propagandists.
Everyone on the list will be banned from issuing visas and their assets will be frozen.
The publication notes that Lenara Ivanova is one of the key figures involved in the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and their subsequent illegal adoption by Russian families. Official Duhin, who is also planned to be included in the list, facilitated the illegal adoption of Ukrainian children into families living in the Moscow region. Moskalkova, speaking on Russian television, denied the existence of "filtration camps" in the occupied territory, but thousands of children were deported from there, the publication clarifies.
Earlier in February, the Conflict Observatory project concluded that the Russian Federation has a network of institutions that “re-educate” Ukrainian children abducted during the war. Most of them were created on the basis of recreation camps; in total, at least six thousand children went through such camps. Only 125 of the 13,899 children illegally taken by Russian authorities in the almost year since the invasion have been returned to the country, according to Daria Gerasimchuk, Commissioner for Children's Rights and Child Rehabilitation in Ukraine.