DISINFO: Ukraine steals Donbas children and gives them to British paedophiles
SUMMARY
The Ukrainian government is stealing children from Donetsk, sending them to Poland, and handing them over to British paedophiles.
RESPONSE
The claim advances a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative concerning Russia's illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The article, published by a pro-Kremlin Russian website, Svobodnaya Pressa,, cites a genuine July 2022 report originally published by the UK newspaper The Independent as saying that, according to the National Crime Agency, British paedophiles had travelled to Poland to prey on Ukrainian minors. However, The Independent makes it clear that the children in question "ha[d] been displaced from Ukraine" owing to the unprecedented humanitarian disaster which the Russian invasion visited on the country. Neither the original report nor any other sources suggest that the Ukrainian authorities deliberately apprehended Ukrainian children with the purpose of trafficking them to foreign sexual predators.
On the other hand, available evidence confirms that the Russian Army and other Russian state-affiliated actors have been involved in the abduction and forced deportation to Russia of Ukrainian children, as reported by the UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.
These and other reports have formed the basis of the international warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and Russia's "presidential commissioner for children's rights," Maria Lvova-Belova, issued by the International Criminal Court, the ICC.
For additional context, see here for our previous debunking of Russian claims regarding forced child abductions, and here for the overview of Russia's child-nabbing policy from the perspective of international law by The Insider (in Russian).