Ukraine launches mobile app to find war’s lost children

Ukraine launched a mobile application on Thursday to help find children who have disappeared during more than 13 months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the National Police said.

Kyiv estimates 19,544 children have been deported to Russia during the invasion, with only 328 of them returned. Moscow, which controls chunks of Ukraine’s east and south, denies abducting children and says they were taken for their safety.

Ukraine has joined forces with US tech company Find My Parent to develop the app “Reunite Ukraine” that would help reconnect families separated during the conflict, said Oleksander Fatsevych, deputy head of the National Police.

“It is one of the instruments to find children and reunite them with the families,” he told an online briefing.

“If we find even one child in such a way or reunite one family, it will be already a victory, a small one, but with every step we will be able to return children home.”

The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.

Moscow has not concealed a program under which it has brought thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia from occupied areas, but presents it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.

The children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, said this week that Russia had accepted more than 5 million refugees from Ukraine’s Donbas region, including 730,000 children with parents or legal guardians, since February 2022.

Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC and has called the warrant null and void.

The app was free to download and easy to operate, Fatsevych said. It had multi-level identity security checks. Police would check and confirm personal profiles and act as an intermediary to enable communication via the app.

Fatsevych said the app would enable police to gather more data in a safe and secure way, including from people in Russia, Belarus or in occupied territories who wanted to help the Ukrainian children.