[Witness spoke in Ukrainian, interpreted as follows:]

Thank you very much. Thank you for your ongoing support of Ukraine.

I represent the office of the representative on children's rights of the office of the President of Ukraine, and I would like to talk to you about the children who are currently under occupied territories and who were forcibly transferred there.

From the beginning of the aggression, and according to data from the information bureau, more than 20,000 children were deported or forcefully transferred. However, as you can tell, we don't really have real data because, in some of the other information we have, there were more than 700,000 children transferred.

These children are so-called “evacuated”, but that is not really true because humanitarian corridors should be opened for evacuation. Unfortunately, after February 24, 2022, there hasn't been a single humanitarian corridor opened to let these children pass, and 1.5 million children remain on occupied territories. We are collecting information about war crimes that the Russian Federation perpetrates against our children, including militarizing and changing their education, and propaganda. Children are being taken, under the pretext of rehabilitation, 2,000 kilometres away from their homes. If the parents protest, they're told that their children will simply be taken away without consent.

All establishments that existed in Russia are now filled with Ukrainian children. Who are these children? Some of them lose their parents because of the war. Some of them are there because they were just taken from their parents, without any kind of consent. We don't know. However, as the commissioner's office, we have to collect information about all of the children who were forcibly removed or deported, and about how all of the children, who are today on the occupied territories, are doing and how their rights are violated. We have to inform IRCC and other international organizations. We have to locate these children and understand where exactly they are.

We work with governmental and non-governmental organizations and with investigative journalists outside Ukraine, who help us use open-source information to locate these children. We work on the verification of these children by using databases in Russia that are open—for example, the adoptions website. In Russia, there are over 300 cases in which we see that children who are being put up for adoption, placed into foster care or adopted into Russian families are Ukrainian children. All of this constitutes war crimes and, unfortunately, no one can help us return these children today.

I have a story of Margarita Prokopenko. She has a brother, who is somewhere. We don't know where they are. They were in one of the orphanages in Kherson that we didn't have the time to evacuate. Margarita was taken by the wife of Sergey Mironov, a Russian politician. Her name was changed, and her date and place of birth were changed. We found her sister, who's been placed into a family. We restored the information, and we were prepared to reunite the children, but the Russian Federation keeps denying us access to this child, saying that we are making this up and that no such child exists.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these cases, and I believe you'll hear more about this from the next speaker.

What should we be doing now, once we know where the children are? We have to look for ways to get them back. One way the ombudsman uses is through Qatar. We are using negotiations to get children back, but this doesn't always work.

In April, Qatar received a list of 560 children, but only 54 on this list came back. Is this a lot? I don't think so. Out of 19,500 children, only 1,019 have come back, and each story they tell is very tragic. We have to double our efforts to get these children back. If we move at the pace we are moving at today, it will take 50 or maybe 60 years to get them back.

It's very important for us to have Canada today and in the future stand with Ukraine the way you stand by us to help with reintegration programs. We also ask you to implement more sanctions against the people who are perpetrating these war crimes.

Thank you.

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