Russians have been accused by Kyiv’s human rights commissioner of kidnapping his country’s children and selling them for sex.
Ukrainian parliament’s rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets made this known in a post on messaging app Telegram on Thursday.
“Telegram channels revealed that Russians are kidnapping Ukrainian children and making sexual videos with them.
“For example, they are offering 250,000 rubles (€3,271) for a boy who should start school soon,” he said, describing the boy as a Ukrainian orphan.
Times of Malta reports that Lubinets posted an excerpt from an exchange on WhatsApp between two people allegedly discussing using a young boy for a child pornography shoot.
“He has been brought from Ukraine, from an orphanage, has no relatives,” one of the two people says in the exchange.
“They ordered a series of videos with him,” he said. The person did not give the child’s age but said the boy should start school “soon”.
“We are bringing in little ones for this type of work, that’s not the first we’ve brought in,” the person added.
Lubinets did not say how he obtained the copy of the exchange but called on Ukraine’s police, cyber police and prosecutors to take “appropriate measures to find and punish the guilty.
“The Russian Federation is insidiously kidnapping, killing, deporting and raping our children,” he added.
“How is this even possible in today’s world?!”
Ukraine has accused Russian forces of kidnapping thousands of children – including orphans – and taking them into Russian-controlled territory.