In Ukraine, " no ceasefire can be considered without the return of all deported children. " This is the appeal launched by our op-ed, published by Libération on February 22, 2025, supported by a collective of figures from the political, cultural, and academic worlds, and open for signature by all citizens on the website of For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!

It is notably co-signed by a cross-party group of parliamentarians from the central bloc (EPR, Independents) and the left (PS, Ecologists) including MPs Gabriel Attal, former Prime Minister, President of the Ensemble pour la République Group and of the France-Ukraine friendship group in the National Assembly, Olivier Faure, First Secretary of the Socialist Party, Natalia Pouzyre (EPR) Secretary of the National Defence and Armed Forces Committee, Senator Claude Malhuret, President of the Les Indépendants Group, and Senator Nadia Sollogoub (Centrist Union) President of the France-Ukraine friendship group in the Senate.

“Faced with this systemic crime of such gravity,” the signatories warn, “it would be a mistake to condemn it while simultaneously dissociating its humanitarian aspect from its geopolitical dimension. The temptation to separate ceasefire negotiations from the question of the children’s return would constitute a moral and strategic catastrophe, because evil cannot be appeased; it must be defeated and punished. To renounce this would not only abandon these children to their fate, but also give Russia carte blanche to continue perpetrating crimes against humanity in its future conquests.”

Indeed, these deportations, "far from being isolated or improvised acts, constitute a systematic program, planned well before the 2022 invasion." This program "mobilizes considerable resources": military, with the use of army units, and political, with the involvement of high-ranking officials and thousands of activists from the United Russia party under the moral authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, as established by the investigations conducted by our association and submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in December 2022 and September 2023.

The Kremlin's intention " is not only to destroy the Ukrainian identity of these children, but to forcibly incorporate them into the 'Russian nation, '" the text states. This process, an " absolute priority for the regime ," is therefore directly overseen by Vladimir Putin through his Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, which led to the ICC issuing arrest warrants on March 17, 2023, which "revealed the scale of a crime unprecedented since the Second World War."

" It is up to Europe to raise its voice," our op-ed concludes, "because it cannot accept such a crime within its borders without betraying its conscience and fundamental values. History will judge us on our ability to make the return of deported Ukrainian children a non-negotiable condition of any agreement with Russia . "