The Parliament of the Republic of Moldova condemned the genocidal policy of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, carried out through the forced displacement and deportation of Ukrainian children to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and to the Russian Federation. A declaration to this effect was adopted by the votes of 60 MPs, IPN reports.

The document condemns the Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which resulted in multiple sacrifices among the civilian population, millions of internally displaced persons and refugees. The document also states that hundreds of children were killed and thousands of children were injured, these being the most unprotected victims of the aggression. Moreover, almost 2/3 of the children in Ukraine became internally displaced persons and about 2 million children, together with their mothers, were forced to seek refuge in other states.

In this connection, the signatories of the declaration confirm Moldova’s commitment to continue policies to ensure the access of refugee children from Ukraine to studies in their mother tongue, to the Ukrainian cultural space, as well as the efforts to preserve their national identity and spiritual relations with Ukraine.

Respectively, the declaration reaffirms the Moldovan authorities’ readiness to continue providing humanitarian assistance to refugees from Ukraine and calls on the democratic world, international humanitarian organizations to combine forces to identify, locate and repatriate to Ukraine forcibly displaced and deported children.

“The Republic of Moldova joins other parliaments that adopted similar declarations, such as the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, France, Iceland, the U.S. and Canada,” said Parliament Deputy Speaker Doina Gherman, one of the authors of the declaration.

The declaration was passed by the votes of 60 MPs. A number of the opposition MPs affiliated to Ilan Shor, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison, criticized the initiative. Communist MP Oleg Reidman also spoke out against the declaration.