President Volodymyr Zelensky told a briefing room on Monday that during the negotiations in Istanbul, the Russians called Ukraine’s demands to return stolen children a “show for childless European old ladies” while at the same time admitting that they had abducted several hundred children. “I would like our journalists and our people to understand their attitude toward the humanitarian aspect [of the war],” Zelensky said. “The first thing they told us was that we ‘should not organize a show for childless European old ladies.’ This is their attitude towards our raising the issue of children.” “We told them that they had abducted 20,000. They said they never abducted 20,000, at most it was hundreds,” Zelensky said. The important thing to focus on here is “not the number, but the very fact that they admit that they abducted children,” the president said. The COO of the Bring Kids Back UA initiative, Daria Zarivna, sustains that the number of children kidnapped from Ukraine by Russia could be much higher than the officially confirmed 19,546. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025. Putin’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova (against whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in March 2023 for her role in abducting children alongside Putin) claimed that Russia has “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023. While some have been brought to Russia for a public education that better suits Moscow, even others have been trained as soldiers to fight against their own country. Kyiv Post reviewed reports and materials published by Yunarmiya – the organization responsible for mobilizing the hearts and minds of Ukrainian youth – in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region since August 2023. It found powerful evidence of a concerted Kremlin effort to motivate Ukrainian minors to hate the country in which they were born and to become patriotic Russian citizens. Zelensky said the Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations in Istanbul handed over to the Russian side a list of the names of almost 400 children. “They offered to do something in this regard, but only up to 10 children. This is their vision on humanitarian issues,” Zelensky said.