Part Two: Child Trafficking in War - From Deportation to Risks of Exploitation
While fighting the largest war in Europe since World War II, Ukraine has become a critical case study with important lessons emerging for combating human trafficking in war and conflict zones. This article is part of a three-part essay series, War & Trafficking: Lessons from Ukraine, by anti-trafficking and child protection expert, Julia Sachenko. This series will culminate in a webinar in late summer 2026.
War does not affect all children equally. For some, war means interrupted education, the loss of home, friends, and the routines that shape childhood. For others, it means months spent in bomb shelters, physical injuries, the death of parents, or prolonged separation from their families. But there is another group of children for whom war means something even more devastating: the complete loss of control over their own lives.
Under the guise of “evacuation,” “recreation,” or “summer camps,” children in Russian occupied Eastern Ukraine are isolated from their families, pressured to abandon their identity, and subjected to military-patriotic programs. Returned children describe military drills, tactical medicine training, trench digging, weapons handling, setting tripwires, and grenade-throwing exercises.
Recently, I co-authored the Return Every Child Report, along with War Child UK and Save Ukraine, documenting these practices of indoctrination and militarization. Several families we spoke with described returning home only to discover their teenagers were missing. Representatives of the occupying authorities had come to their homes, telling their children they were going to “summer camp” without any chance to refuse or tell their families where they were going. Weeks turned into months while they were moved from one camp to another. There, they were told their country no longer exists and that if their families did not come for them, they would be adopted by other families.
Is this child trafficking? Or is it something else?
Under the Palermo Protocol and the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, two essential elements are necessary to prove child trafficking:
- An act (recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child);
- Purpose for exploitation. This includes forced labour or services, sexual exploitation, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the removal of organs.
Unlike trafficking cases involving adults, it is not necessary to prove force, coercion, deception, or abuse of vulnerability.
In many of these cases involving the unlawful transfer of Ukrainian children into Belarus and Russia, the “act” element is clearly present. Indoctrination and militarization do not, in and of themselves, constitute exploitation. Yet when combining the unlawful transfer, prolonged isolation, complete dependency, and forced military involvement or other activities, these circumstances may amount to a pattern consistent with child trafficking.
This debate is no longer hypothetical. The National Social Service of Ukraine has already granted official victim-of-trafficking status to a number of children (25 as of July 2026) returned from unlawful deportation. In these cases, the competent authority concluded that the legal elements of trafficking in persons were present. Yet many other children exposed to remarkably similar circumstances continue to fall outside existing trafficking determinations, raising an important question: how does one identify child trafficking during war?
The question became the central focus of my analytical study prepared for the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA). The study concluded that while not every case of unlawful deportation or forcible transfer reaches the legal threshold of trafficking in human beings, these situations create environments in which the risk of exploitation is embedded within the control exercised over the child.
Children with disabilities and complex medical needs are particularly vulnerable. Following their transfer, they may be placed in closed medical or residential institutions without independent monitoring, family access, or any possibility of reporting abuse. The study documents testimonies concerning children held in isolated facilities under the control of individuals associated with medical and military structures, where blood was reportedly taken from them on a regular basis. These accounts have not been independently verified and therefore cannot be presented as established evidence of trafficking in persons. Nevertheless, they raise serious concerns requiring investigation into potential medical exploitation, the unlawful removal of biological materials, and the risk of trafficking for the purpose of organ removal.
The war has also revealed an entirely new method of exploiting children - one that few anti-trafficking systems were designed to detect. Adolescents are increasingly recruited online to carry out sabotage, arson, intelligence gathering, and other unlawful acts in support of military objectives. It is happening far from the front line. The victims’ age, vulnerability, and desire to prove themselves are deliberately exploited by the aggressor state. As documented by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this emerging pattern demonstrates that modern armed conflicts are creating entirely new forms of child exploitation that fall outside many traditional protection frameworks. More than 260 criminal proceedings have already been initiated involving Ukrainian children recruited for such activities. Yet these adolescents are often viewed as offenders rather than as children who may have been recruited, manipulated, and exploited. Many face criminal prosecution carrying prison sentences of up to ten years, while the possibility that they are victims of exploitation frequently remains outside the legal analysis. Ukraine may be the first country to document this phenomenon on such a scale - but it is unlikely to be the last.
In July 2026, GRETA officially stated that the unlawful deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children create trafficking risks and, under certain circumstances, may fall within the definition of trafficking in human beings. GRETA highlighted closed camps and institutions, forced labour, changes in documentation, citizenship and guardianship, illegal adoptions, militarization, and indoctrination as factors requiring particular attention. At the same time, it carefully distinguishes between situations in which an exploitative purpose has already been established and the broader category of war crimes, where the available evidence remains insufficient to legally identify a child as a victim of trafficking in persons.
This brings us to a question that extends far beyond Ukraine. The question is no longer simply “Has child trafficking already occurred?” We should also ask: “When do trafficking risks become sufficiently evident to activate protection mechanisms?”
Anti-trafficking systems should not begin functioning only after exploitation has been proven in court. They should provide early risk assessment, child tracing, independent access to closed institutions, medical and legal monitoring, safe return procedures, victim identification, and long-term reintegration. Because for a child living under complete isolation and control, waiting for conclusive proof may simply mean that protection arrives too late.