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Russian president Vladimir Putin is waging war to try and wipe Ukraine off the map, the country’s top tennis player has warned.
Elina Svitolina, 30, accused Russia of genocide and urged the West to help bring back roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children deported to Russian camps since Putin’s invasion in February 2022.
More than 70 camps used to forcibly “re-educate” children have been found across Russia, Belarus and occupied Crimea, according to the Ukrainian government.
Svitolina stunned the sporting world in 2023 after she beat world No 1 Iga Swiatek in the Wimbledon quarter-finals just eight months after giving birth to her daughter.
Now an ambassador for Bring Back Kids UA, she told The Independent: “How we feel as Ukrainians is that the Russian government wants to erase us from the map.
“By taking our territory, by stealing our children, and launching missiles at us. This is genocide and they try to do it in different ways.”
Svitolina is married to French tennis player Gael Monfils, who was ranked world No 6 in 2016. She gave birth to their daughter Skai just a few months after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022.
She added: “As a mother, this work is very important to me. The children are our future. We have to act to bring them back.
“It is a terrible issue that we have here in Ukraine. We need to do something about it. It is not acceptable in our world.”
After getting to the semi-finals in 2023, Svitolina said: “I think war made me stronger and also made me mentally stronger. I think having a child, and war, made me a different person. I look at things a bit differently.”
In 2023, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the Ukrainian children “found themselves in an entirely pro-Russian environment” after being removed from their homes.
“They are exposed to a pro-Russian information campaign often amounting to targeted re-education,” the organisation added.
The OSCE research stated, “the Russian Federation does not take any steps to actively promote the return of Ukrainian children”.
This is despite the right of return being mandated by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of children during war.
Instead, the OSCE found that “[Russia] creates various obstacles for families seeking to get their children back”.
In June, The Independent spoke to five teenagers who were taken into Russia or Russian-occupied territory before eventually being rescued – experiencing abuse and humiliation.
Russian authorities have made it easier to adopt a Ukrainian child, change their name and issue them with a Russian passport.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian commissioner for children’s rights, in connection with the deportations.
The Kremlin has denied allegations of deportations and claimed children were moved to areas outside combat zones, dismissing the arrest warrants as meaningless.
Mykola Kuleba, CEO of Save Ukraine, a charity working to return the children, said: “Russia is stealing our future. They base their strategy on deception, indoctrination of children, and genocide of the Ukrainian nation.
“Children are forbidden to speak Ukrainian or display any Ukrainian symbols. Children are severely punished if they resist singing the Russian anthem.”
Save Ukraine has returned 373 children, including 88 orphans, Mr Kuleba said, adding that many returnees showed signs of trauma.
On Friday, nine children taken from Luhansk and Donetsk were returned to Ukraine and a Qatari-brokered deal between Kyiv and Moscow.
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said the children ranged in age from 13 to 17, with a 20-year-old man also included in the operation.
Several suffered from disabilities and a number of them had been taken from an orphanage in southern Kherson region, first to the Russian-held town of Skadovsk and then to Russia itself, Mr Lubinets said.
Several of the returnees lost one or both parents to the war and were turned over to grandparents, the commissioner said.
“We are always ready to bring children home on a large scale, but the Russians will do everything to drag out the process,” Mr Lubinets said on national television.
Mr Lubinets said Qatar authorities were engaged in negotiations to bring home more and that he had turned over to them a list of 751 children with paperwork completed for their return.
