Missing Ukrainian Children a Sore Point in Talks

The peace talks between Russia and Ukraine that resumed on Monday brought attention to a volatile topic: allegations that Russia abducted thousands of Ukrainian children.

• Ukraine provided a list of about 400 children it wants returned immediately, but Russia countered that it would consider returning 10 children and insisted they weren't abducted but saved from war zones, reports NPR.
• Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that the Russian negotiators accused Ukraine of trying to manipulate the emotions of "childless European old ladies" by bringing up the subject, reports the Kyiv Independent.

• "We told them they had stolen 20,000 children, and they responded that it wasn't 20,000—at most, they said, it was a matter of a few hundred," Zelensky said. "I think it's more important not to fixate on the number, but on the fact itself—they admitted to taking children. We believe it's thousands, they say it's hundreds, but what matters is that they acknowledged the fact."
• The exact number of missing children is indeed in doubt. The Conflict Observatory—part of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab—has "verified that at least 19,500 children were forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine, funneled into reeducation camps or adopted by Russian families, their identities erased," per the Washington Post.
• Roughly 1,300 have been returned to Ukraine over three years of war, and the Post story focuses on one of them, 13-year-old Illia Matviienko.

(More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)