The US has called on Russia to immediately release Ukrainians who were forced to leave Ukraine for Russia and to allow outside observers in, citing reports that Moscow is giving Ukrainian children up for adoption while thousands of others " It is reported by "

“The illegal transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilian Persons and is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Wednesday..

In his statement, Blinken said that Moscow was reportedly “deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents or kidnapping them from orphanages before giving them up for adoption in Russia” and “detaining or taking away thousands of Ukrainian citizens in an unknown direction,.

Ukrainian authorities accused Russia of deporting hundreds of thousands of people from Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine and forcibly placing them in so-called “filtration camps”.

The 1949 Geneva Convention, which defines the international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in conflict, prohibits the massive forced transfer of civilians to the territory of an occupying country, qualifying this as a war crime.

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“Estimates from various sources, including the Russian government, indicate that Russian authorities interrogated, detained and forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, to Russia – often to isolated regions in the Far East,” he said..