THE World Council of Churches (WCC) has voiced grave concern about Russia’s continuing mass abduction of Ukrainian children, after a United Nations commission confirmed that thousands still remained unaccounted for.
“These actions are a shocking violation of the God-given dignity of every child and the sanctity of family bonds”, the WCC’s general secretary, the Revd Professor Jerry Pillay, said last week.
“The deliberate removal and relocation of children for political or ideological purposes is fundamentally incompatible with international law, morality and Christian values, which call us to protect the smallest and most vulnerable among us. As the WCC has consistently affirmed, armed aggression and the suffering it inflicts, especially upon children, are fundamentally incompatible with God’s will for humanity.”
Professor Pillay was responding to a report by a UN-appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry, which said that Russia had committed crimes against humanity by forcibly deporting Ukrainian children during and after its February 2022 invasion.
In a statement on behalf of the WCC’s 356 member Churches, representing more than 580 million Christians, Professor Pillay said that the Commission’s findings confronted “the conscience of the whole international community” and urged Moscow to show “transparency and accountability” towards the children and their families.
“According to the Commission, thousands of children have been taken from Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation, many removed from institutions and families without the consent required by international humanitarian law and still not returned years later.
“Instead of facilitating reunification, Russian authorities are reported to have prioritised the long-term placement of these children within the Russian Federation, including through changes of citizenship and adoption or foster care. Such actions deprive children of their families, language, culture and homeland, inflicting deep psychological and spiritual harm.”
The 17-page report, submitted to the UN’s Human Rights Council, said that investigators had verified the deportation and forcible transfer of 1205 children, aged 11 months to 17 years, from five Ukrainian regions, causing “deep distress” to their families.
It said that profiles of deported children had later appeared on adoption databases in 14 regions of the Russian Federation, and that many were suffering “trauma, anxiety and fear of abandonment”.
The report, drawn from 232 interviews and more than 2000 documents, said that “enforced disappearances” and unjustified repatriation delays constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity, while forced separations, status changes, and failure to obtain family reunions violated international humanitarian law.
The report was published before the funeral in Kyiv, on Sunday, of Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko), who became the first Ukrainian Orthodox leader to break with the Russian Church in the 1990s, and later founded a small Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate, or UOC–KP.
In a message on Monday, the Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, praised Filaret’s “important role” in establishing an independent Ukraine and local Church “free of Russian domination and enslavement”.
Preaching on Sunday, the Primate of the larger Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), said that Filaret had helped fellow Christians to testify to love of country, and the Metropolian pledged to continue his work towards “church unity of all Orthodox in Ukraine around the Kyivan throne”.
In media comments this week, as Ukrainian Churches outlined plans for a joint celebration of Easter, two religious experts, Serhiy Shumylo and Oleksandr Sagan, predicted that the several dozen communities belonging to the UOC-KP could now agree to be incorporated into Metropolitan Epiphany’s OCU.