Ukraine returns 12-year-old boy from occupied territories

Serhiy Kuzmenko, mayor of Oleksandria, Kirovohrad region, reported this.

"City services helped return a 12-year-old boy from the temporarily occupied territory. His elder sister, an IDP registered in Oleksandria, appealed to the Ombudsman with a request to take him out of the occupation," he wrote.

The boy lived with his grandmother in the temporarily occupied territory because his mother died in the summer of 2022.

"He kept in touch with his sister and kept saying that he wanted to live with her," the mayor said.

As a result, the executive committee of the city council granted the child status, and the sister received a decision to establish guardianship. Now the child is already in Oleksandria.

What is known about the return of children from the temporarily occupied territories

On September 14, 2023, Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said that 386 young Ukrainians had been returned home since the creation of a separate coordination headquarters for children. These are only those children who were deported to the territory of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the number of children returned from the occupation will be counted separately.

"We decided to divide these figures because it is one thing to return a child from the territory of the Russian Federation after deportation, and another thing is when we return children who were forcibly displaced within the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine," Lubinets said.

As of mid-December 2023, Save Ukraine has returned 223 Ukrainian children from Russia and the temporarily occupied territories.