Russia and the deportation of children: behind the scenes of an investigation

On November 11, 2022, in a pediatric institute in Henichesk, in the Kherson Oblast, Maria Lvova-Belova seized an infant and immediately handed it to one of the soldiers accompanying her in this predatory operation.

Since the beginning of the war, Jean-Marc Adolphe's patient investigation for les humanités has played a decisive role in raising awareness of the system of forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia. In a video interview with subscribers, Jean-Marc Adolphe revisited the behind-the-scenes aspects of this work—from the initial Google alerts to the uncovering of a structured politico-religious apparatus involving the Russian state, United Russia, and the Orthodox Church—demonstrating how "open-source journalism" can, on its own, reveal the genocidal logic at work behind the Kremlin's humanitarian propaganda.

As the association "For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours" writes: "Since the beginning of the war, a pioneering journalist, Jean-Marc Adolphe, has been developing on his website, leshumanites-media.com , the incisive investigation that catalyzed in France the awareness of the existence of the transfer of children, its necessary classification as genocide, and the call for action at a media, political, and humanitarian level" (see "The investigation that first revealed in France the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and Belarus" ).

A few days ago, during a video interview involving Caterina Zomer, deputy editor of les humanités, and several subscriber readers, Jean-Marc Adolphe was kind enough to reveal some of the behind-the-scenes details of his investigation.

He begins by recounting how, from the very beginning of the Russian invasion, he sought an angle that escaped the dominant military commentary, to focus on people and the discreet traces of wartime violence.

It is in this context that he sets up Google alerts in French, Ukrainian and Russian, until on April 2, 2022 he came across Timofey Sergeytsev's article on the website of the official Russian agency RIA Novosti, later published under the title "Vladimir Putin's Mein Kampf", which explains a genocidal project over several generations, notably through the indoctrination of Ukrainian children ( HERE ).

At the same time, he closely followed the siege of Mariupol, which he anticipated as early as March 1, 2022 ( HERE ), documented the first "filtration camps" and published as early as April 10, 2022 on the deportations in Russia ( HERE ), while these elements remained largely absent from the French press ( HERE ).

The shift towards the issue of children began with seemingly innocuous details: a local Russian newspaper article about Ukrainian “refugees” housed in a gymnasium in Taganrog, a photo with a representative of the Russian Red Cross, official figures of hundreds of thousands of “voluntary” displaced persons that don't correspond to any images of convoys of cars at the Russian-Ukrainian border. The investigation, which progresses patiently from these initial documents, corroborated by testimonies and NGO reports, uncovers a mechanism where Mariupol residents board “humanitarian” buses, believing they are going to Kyiv or other destinations in Ukraine, and end up in Russia, often after passing through filtering camps where families can be separated. As the publications accumulate, the conviction grows stronger that, behind the Russian rhetoric of humanitarian welcome, lies a system of forced transfers in which children occupy a central place, even if, initially, they appear lost in the mass of displaced “citizens.”

The interview emphasizes the methodology employed, which Jean-Marc Adolphe likens to "open-source journalism": meticulous digging through online content—local archives, social media, public databases, satellite imagery—combined with "protected" human sources (whose identities are withheld to avoid endangering them). He recounts the considerable time spent translating entire pages into Russian, a language he doesn't speak fluently, the multitude of false leads and "dead ends" encountered in the search for a few crucial documents, and how, from an initial "needle in a haystack," a thread unravels into a 350-page ball of printed material. This approach is also an implicit critique of the French media landscape: dependence on AFP, the scarcity of investigative journalism and critical analysis, and the structural laziness that leads newsrooms to ignore investigations that are nonetheless sourced and verifiable with a simple click on the hyperlinks embedded in published articles.

The individual investigation is part of a broader ecosystem: investigations by NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Memorial), work by the Humanitarian Laboratory Research at Yale University, investigations by international media and associations such as For Ukraine, For Their Freedom and Ours or Russia-Liberties , but also the drastic limitations imposed by Putin's Russia, which expels or bans independent organizations and restricts access to the field, including for UNICEF and the International Red Cross. From the Ukrainian perspective, the interview highlights the constraints of a state at war, overwhelmed institutions, saturated services, and organizations like Save Ukraine that work almost clandestinely in Russia to find and repatriate, child by child, a small minority of those deported. Jean-Marc Adolphe rejects any heroic posture, simply saying he is "less lazy than others", but claims to take the long time, to pay attention to detail and to demand proof when he uses words like "trafficking" or "genocidal system".

Maria Lvova-Belova, speaking on October 27, 2022 via video transmission at a seminar of the Russian Orthodox Church in Soichi,

titled "Traditional Values - Future of Russia".

The final section opens up a broader political and religious framework for understanding this system: the legacy of the first Russian child rights commissars, the ambivalent trajectory of figures like "Doctora Lisa," the close alliance between Putin's regime and the Orthodox Church of Kirill, a former KGB agent, and the structuring role of the United Russia party as the oil that "lubricates" the entire machine. Within this system, the federal and regional child rights commissars, all products of the establishment, have direct channels to the Kremlin and an administrative network that facilitates the transfer of children from the occupied territories to the Russian oblasts. Faced with estimates of 30,000 to 300,000 displaced minors, for only 500 to 1,000 known adoptions and Russian orphanages already full, the now central hypothesis of the investigation is the massive use of the network of Orthodox monasteries and religious institutions to disperse, hide and indoctrinate these children, far from any international control.

Jean-Marc Adolphe then outlines the extensions of this long-term investigation: identifying pilot regions like Tver, where "refugee children" presented as having arrived "of their own accord" from Donetsk are in fact revealed to have been kidnapped in Mariupol; pinpointing transit points like Crimea and Taganrog; and cross-referencing recent testimonies mentioning monasteries where Ukrainian children are allegedly being held and mistreated. The goal is no longer simply to denounce a state crime, but to uncover specific locations, networks, and institutions, in order to facilitate concerted action by journalists, NGOs, international institutions, and Ukrainian authorities to find these tens of thousands of invisible children. True to the spirit of the humanities , Jean-Marc Adolphe thus defends a journalism that refuses resignation, champions the patience required for proof, and reminds us that a crucial part of the truth lies hidden in the accessible corners of the internet, provided they are explored relentlessly.

Dominique Vernis

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