Overview
- Kateryna Rashevska told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that a 12-year-old from occupied Donetsk and a 16-year-old from occupied Simferopol were transferred to North Korea’s Songdowon camp roughly 9,000 kilometers from their homes.
- Her testimony described militarized indoctrination at the camp, including lessons about destroying “Japanese militarists” and meetings with veterans tied to the 1968 Pueblo attack.
- Ukraine’s Children of War database records at least 19,546 abducted children since 2022, with just 1,876 returned so far.
- Researchers have mapped a wide network for these transfers, including at least 210 receiving sites identified by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab and 165 re-education camps documented by the Regional Center for Human Rights across Russia, occupied areas, Belarus and North Korea.
- The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the immediate return of all deported Ukrainian children as ICC warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova over the abductions remain in effect.