Belarus is accused of having participated in the illegal displacement of children from Ukrainian lands held by Russia, exiled Belarusian opposition leaders say in a preliminary report.

The National Crisis Management Administration, a group of political opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko’s government, said in its report that 2,150 Ukrainian children, including orphans aged 6 to 15, were taken to so-called recreation camps and sanatoriums on Belarusian territory. .

Reuters made a request to Lukashenko’s office to comment on these accusations, but did not receive a response.

Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor told Reuters last year that there had been cases of forced deportations of children from Ukraine to Russia and Belarus. Ukrainian prosecutors today did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Around 20,000 children have been smuggled into Russia since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with some of these children being given up for adoption, according to Kiev.

In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, charging them with two counts of war crimes for transporting hundreds of Ukrainians to Russia.

Yula Iofe, an assistant professor at University College London and an expert in child rights law, stressed that if these accusations against the Lukashenko regime are substantiated, Belarus will “very likely” have violated the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“Belarus’s actions may also amount to a crime against humanity of ‘displacement or forcible movement of a population’ under the Rome Statute of the ICC, provided there is sufficient evidence that the forcible movements are widespread or systematic,” Iofe pointed out.

Belarus cannot under any circumstances be considered a neutral country to which the children could be legally moved because there is no indication that Ukraine has given its consent to such transfers of children, she added.

The authors of the report claim that Ukrainian children were taken to the Belarusian Golden Sands sanatorium in the Gomel region and the Ostroshitsky Gorodok sanatorium and the Dubrava camp in the Minsk region.

The transfers of children to Belarus were illegal and in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the ICC Statute, the report said.

A first group of about 350 children arrived from the occupied Donetsk region on September 5 and 6, followed by a second and a third group in late September and mid-October, the report noted. Additional child transfers took place in April and May 2023.

The children were taken by bus to Russia from Russian-controlled Ukrainian territories and then by train to Belarus, it said.

“Lukashenko himself personally ordered the transport of orphans to Belarus and facilitated their arrival with financial and organizational support,” the report stresses, accusing the Belarusian president of war crimes.