As President Donald Trump rushes to "make a deal" with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end Russia's war against Ukraine, it's on us, the American people, to make sure Ukraine gets a good deal.
President Trump will not achieve a good deal unless he ensures that these kids come home.
The Statistics:
Ukraine's Bring Kids Back initiative has verified at least 19,546 cases of Russia forcibly transferring Ukrainian children to Russia, Belarus, and elsewhere.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Russian wartime policy that bars independent researchers the ability to investigate these allegations means an exact number is hard to come by.
Credible estimates put the number of captive Ukrainian children upwards of 200,000.
Independent NGOs like Save Ukraine and others have rescued 1,240 children from Russian captivity. Meanwhile, an additional 1.2 million children live at risk of abduction in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. Scroll the infographic to get a sense of the scale of this crisis.
Only an intervention of the United States and Ukraine's Western allies can free all of these kids.
"We were completely labeled as children of the Russian Federation. They simply erased our identity as Ukrainians — citizens who have lived in Ukraine all our lives, although now in its militarily occupied part."
