Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly, centre, flanked by Ukraine Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha, left, and Norway Minister of Foreign Affairs Espen Barth Eide, speaks during a plenary session at the Ministerial Conference on the Human Dimension of Ukraine's 10-Point Peace Formula, in Montreal on Wednesday. Canada’s foreign affairs minister says she hopes countries from around the world will support a plan to bring back Ukrainian children who have been deported to Russia since the war in Ukraine began nearly three years ago. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi

MONTREAL - Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says she hopes countries from around the world will support a plan to bring back Ukrainian children who have been deported to Russia since the war in Ukraine began nearly three years ago.

Joly urged more than 70 delegations attending a ministerial conference in Montreal on Wednesday to make a “strong pledge” to ensure children and other Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war are returned home.

"These are not anonymous statistics but real people," she said during opening remarks. "They have stories and dreams that we want to keep safe."

Canada is co-chairing a working group with Ukraine and Norway on the release of prisoners of war, civilians and children who have been forcibly deported to Russia, as part of a 10-point peace plan announced by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in November 2022.

Speaking at a reception Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to the removal of children from Ukraine as an "unfathomable war crime."

He pointed out that Russia's war in Ukraine will reach the 1,000-day mark next month.

"A thousand days of children being abducted from their families and horrifically mistreated in Russia," he said.

The Ukrainian government estimates that 19,500 Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia and 1,800 civilians are unlawfully detained in the country, while another 16,000 Ukrainians are missing, a senior Canadian official told The Canadian Press during a background briefing. The official said that 998 children have been returned to Ukraine to date, but finding deported children is a major challenge.

Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine's deputy prime minister for European integration, said Russia often changes the names and birthplaces of Ukrainian children, to erase the "very evidence of their existence" and make them harder to find. “Ukrainian children abducted to Russia have been illegally adopted and forced to assimilate, losing their identities and ties to their homeland,” she told delegates during the opening meeting.

Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president's office, said taking children is "a deliberate policy to ... destroy Ukrainian identity." He said the international community needs to craft an "effective mechanism" to pressure Russia to send the children home.

Yermak called on delegates to sign a joint declaration endorsing the working group's strategy. The senior official said the plan aims to find more information about Ukrainians held in Russia, advocate for their fair and humane treatment, and find safe pathways for their return. The group is urging Russia to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to detention centres, the official said.

This week's conference follows a June summit in Switzerland, when 78 countries signed a joint communiqué calling for the “territorial integrity” of Ukraine to be the basis of any peace agreement to end the war with Russia. At that event, Trudeau said Russia needs to be accountable for "an element of genocide" he said it was committing by taking thousands of Ukrainian children from their homes.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 30, 2024.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2024