Richard Foord

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Stuart. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Johanna Baxter). Normally we would congratulate somebody on securing a debate, but on this occasion it is such an absolutely miserable subject that all I can say is that I am as sorry as she is about what is going on. It is ironic that yesterday at 2.30 pm in this Chamber we were debating kinship care and adoption in the UK and British Government support for that. When I first heard about Russia’s “adoption” of Ukrainian children, I wondered whether it was an exaggeration on the part of the people speaking about it, but then we look at the evidence provided and it is absolutely going on. Independent investigators at the Yale humanitarian research lab identified in March this year 314 individuals from Ukraine who had been placed in Russia’s programme of coerced fostering or adoption. It describes in great detail the circumstances of those 314 children, but the scale is much greater than that. Russia’s children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, has boasted that 700,000 Ukrainian children have been “accepted” into Russia since the war began. Those children are being re-educated in an effort to assimilate them into Russian society. There are at least 57 re-education camps spread across Russian-occupied Ukraine, Belarus and Russia proper. This is an attempt to eradicate the national identity of Ukrainian children. Videos show children riding around on Belarusian tanks, in body armour and holding rifles. Reports suggest that the children are subjected to psychological coercion, denied their language and indoctrinated with Russian nationalist propaganda. Belarusian President Lukashenko has personally endorsed this so-called ���humanitarian project”. Of the nearly 20,000 children recorded as having been taken, little more than 1,000—just 7%—have been recovered. Maria Lvova-Belova is subject to an international arrest warrant, as is President Putin, in relation to this alleged war crime, yet she can be seen on state television describing how proud she is to have adopted a Ukrainian boy from Mariupol. While the Kremlin has been escalating these abductions, the international response has fallen somewhat short and in some cases has regressed. Just a few weeks ago, the United States Government pulled funding from the conflict observatory based at Yale University. The observatory, which was compiling evidence, had forensically identified satellite imagery and biometric data. It has tracked the identities of 30,000 Ukrainian children taken and their locations. The decision by Trump’s State Department to pull funding has rightly drawn widespread criticism.