The United Nations is being presented with a new trove of evidence to support charges that Russia has stolen Ukrainian children and forced them to take Russian identities — after a team at Yale University managed to hack into Russian adoption databases.
Yale's researchers secretly found within them what they say are 148 Ukrainian children. It's part of the most detailed and extensive evidence presented to date of alleged Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The new report uses open-source intelligence and satellite images to identify Russian government aircraft allegedly used to take away Ukrainian orphans from Russian-occupied areas of Eastern Ukraine.
The evidence collected by Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab builds upon methods and discoveries shown previously to Scripps News by its executive director, Nathaniel Raymond.
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The report alleges that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, ordered this program; it traces how it was carried out by officials at the highest levels of Russia's federal government.
Once children are adopted by Russians, they become far more difficult to track.
The report tracks 314 Ukrainian children — at least 67 of them now naturalized as Russian citizens. But it's believed that there could be thousands more.
With the release of this report, Kyiv is calling for Russia to provide a register of all Ukrainian children currently being held in its custody.
"Ukraine will not rest until our children are returned home and those responsible are held accountable," said Andriy Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in a statement.
On Wednesday, representatives from Ukraine's government, along with Yale's investigators, will appear before a special meeting of the united nations security council — of which Russia is a veto-holding member.
