Russia lists kidnapped Kherson orphanage children for adoption on state portal
Russia has placed four children abducted from a children’s home in Kherson for adoption through its state portal usynovite.rf, with their Ukrainian origins and hometown omitted from the profiles, according to a joint investigation by Current Time (a Russian-language project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) and the Reckoning Project.
The investigation found that Russian authorities took two children from the Kherson children’s home in September 2022 and another 46 on October 21, 2022. Ten of them have since been returned to Ukraine, but most of the abducted children from the facility remain in Russian foster families.
In the published Russian profiles, the children are presented without any mention that they are Ukrainian or from Kherson.
In 2023, Radio Liberty journalists established that one of the girls taken from the home, Marharyta Prokopenko, was adopted by Russian lawmaker and leader of the Just Russia party Sergey Mironov.
The same year, hromadske also reported on the abduction of children from the Kherson children’s home.
Abduction of Ukrainian children
According to the Bring Kids Back platform, Russia has abducted more than 20,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the full-scale invasion. As of March 2026, Ukraine has managed to return 2,058 of them.
On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova on charges of unlawful abduction of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russia. In July 2023, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office opened an investigation into the involvement of the Belarusian Red Cross in the abduction of Ukrainian children.
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