Russia’s Online ‘Slave Catalog’ of Ukrainian Children
‘This is real child trafficking in the 21st century.’
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
A couple years ago, I wrote a story for The Atlantic about the thousands of Ukrainian children who’d been forced into Russia, used as leverage, “reeducated,” and “Russified.” In the course of committing these war crimes, the Russians were making what appeared to be an official, concerted effort to cover the tracks that may lead to the Ukrainian children’s eventual recovery. Processed into the Russian system, the children no longer went by their given names, practiced the religions they were raised in, or communicated with their families.
They were entered into an adoption mechanism that took pains to cover up their provenance, an effort that Ukrainian advocates said not only made the children untraceable, but formed part of a larger project of cultural erasure.
Now, however, the reality of how these adoptions work has been made bare — and it is chilling.
The nonprofit organization Save Ukraine, which works to rescue abducted Ukrainian children, says it has found evidence that the Russians “have switched to methods that cannot be called anything other than child trafficking.” A cofounder of the group, Mykola Kuleba, writes on Instagram (in Ukrainian):
On a hastily created website, you can literally “choose” a child for yourself. They describe children as a commodity: “obedient,” “calm,” etc. Just imagine — you can filter children not only by gender, but also by eye and hair color!
The way they describe our Ukrainian children is no different from a slave catalog. This is real child trafficking in the 21st century, which the world must stop immediately.
Most of the 294 children on the website, which is hosted by the Ministry of Education in occupied Luhansk (and blocked both in the United States and Ukraine), are likely either orphans whose parents have been killed in the war, or children who have been taken from Ukraine and given Russian identity papers.
When I reported my story for The Atlantic, I was told that forcibly transferred children, ages four months to 18 years, were being listed in a public Russian adoption database without mention of their Ukrainian origin. The obfuscation of their nationality, advocates said, was deliberate.
“Hiding that they are Ukrainian in the system shows that the Russians have no intention to ever give them back,” Onysia Syniuk, a legal analyst at ZMINA, a human-rights organization in Ukraine, told me. “They will make them Russian whatever it takes, even if the children have to stay in orphanages.”
That they were in the database at all was not widely known until May 2023, when the Russian dissident outlet iStories exposed its use in an article alleging that the children were being made to sew camouflage nets for the Russian military, which some were even forced to join.
The iStories revelations prompted Russia to scrub the database of all information about the Ukrainian children. Fortunately, much of it had been scraped by at least one group of open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigators who asked not to be named in order to continue their sensitive work. Such groups were scouring publicly available databases, social media, precision satellite imagery showing the locations of camps, and other sources to track the disappearing Ukrainian children.
Side note: One organization that was tracking atrocities in Ukraine — including the abduction of children — the Conflict Observatory at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, was shut down this year because of the Trump administration’s budget cuts.
The new revelations by Save Ukraine are disturbing, but they are also critical evidence of crimes being committed that could one day be used to prosecute the Russian invaders.
“When Russians at the negotiations request the lists of stolen Ukrainian children, it is sufficient to just give them the database from their own ‘Ministry of Education of the Luhansk People’s Republic’ website,” writes Kuleba. “All the evidence of their crimes is available right at their official site.”
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My heart aches, breaks for the parents, for their children. Until/unless Russians en mass turn against Putin, he will continue to ignore all international human rights laws. He'll never be held accountable.
Surreal. Atrocity on top of atrocity. A catalog of slaves. We are complete barbarians.