98 children who were forcibly taken by the occupiers to distant regions of Russia have already been returned to Ukraine.

Iryna Vereshchuk, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, announced this in an interview with the "We are Ukraine" channel.

"We have already returned 98 children. We are trying to do it every day, it is becoming more and more difficult, but I still encourage you to contact us - we have the "Children of War" portal, a hotline, we will try our best to help return the children. The main thing for us is information so that we knew where in Russia, where the children are in the non-controlled territory," Vereshchuk noted.

According to the minister, the children were successfully returned from various regions of Russia, in particular from the Far East, where young Ukrainians are deliberately sent to reduce the likelihood of their return home.

"They are deliberately sent as far away as possible so that people do not have the opportunity to pay for a ticket if the children are with their parents, or separate brothers and sisters so that they cannot communicate with each other," Vereshchuk said.

At the same time, the minister stressed that Russians who adopt Ukrainian children will be held accountable.

We will remind you that earlier the Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine announced that another 37 children deported by the occupiers had returned home.

Deportation of children from the occupied territories to Russia

Dmytro Lubinets, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, said that since the start of the full-scale war, Russia 

has deported more than 7,000 children from Ukraine

The Permanent Representative of Great Britain to the UN explained that the Russian mass deportation of residents of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine may indicate 

Moscow's intention to change the demographic composition of these regions

.

Currently, it is known that the Russian occupiers still continue to take Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied territories.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,

since the beginning of October, the

Russians have taken out about 170 minors from Kherson.

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