By Jim Thomas
Sunday, March 15, 2026 11:42 AM EDT
First lady Melania Trump has been publicly credited by the White House and Ukrainian officials with helping secure child reunifications between Russia and Ukraine. The list includes the return of five children taken from a Kherson children’s home after Russian forces seized the southern city in 2022.
The rescue represents a rare breakthrough in a wider campaign that Kyiv says has swept up thousands of children into Russia and occupied territory. The children included siblings Yuri and Anastasia, who were reunited with their mother, Olga, after nearly four years apart.
The children had been removed from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home, transferred through occupied Crimea, and later placed with a Russian family after receiving Russian documents.
The case has become part of one of the most serious legal and humanitarian disputes of the war in Ukraine. The U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said on March 12 that Russian authorities committed crimes against humanity by deporting and forcibly transferring Ukrainian children, and by causing enforced disappearances.
The commission stated it had verified the deportation or transfer of more than 1,200 children from five Ukrainian regions and found that about 80% of the children in documented cases had not been returned four years later. It also reported that children were kept in Russian families and institutions long-term, systematically granted Russian citizenship, and separated for extended periods, leading to identity erasure.
Save Ukraine founder Mykola Kuleba said very young children are especially hard to recover because they are more vulnerable to Russian indoctrination and prolonged separation from their families. Kuleba stated that Russia uses “deception, indoctrination of children” and reports that children are forbidden to speak Ukrainian and punished for resistance.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, over the alleged unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Children of War portal listed 20,000 children as deported or forcibly displaced and 2,047 as returned as of March 15. The latest return involved five children from the Kherson home and links to intervention by the first lady. The White House said in December that seven additional children had been reunited with families in Ukraine and, in February, that she had helped facilitate a third reunification.
Publicly documented reunification efforts linked to the first lady’s involvement have resulted in at least 20 Ukrainian children being returned to their families, though an initial count reported as 19.
