Ukrainian Children

In a ground-breaking visual investigation, the FT used facial recognition software and public records to identify Ukrainian children that have been abducted and taken to Russia and are now listed on a Russian adoption website. The investigation is the first to reveal that missing Ukrainian children are being given false Russian identities.

The findings add to the mounting body of evidence that the International Criminal Court, Ukrainian government officials and legal experts say point to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russia.

The investigation went beyond other reporting on the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia. We were able to locate missing children whose presence the Ukrainian authorities did not already know about. We also found children it would not have been possible to locate in other ways: in several cases names had been changed, as had other biographical details that could help confirm their identities, such as the children’s ages. That meant the only remaining information that could be used to find them was the profile photographs, making the use of facial recognition software essential.

All of the information used in the investigation was in the public domain and hosted on two websites: a Ukrainian site of children reported missing since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion and a Russian site listing all of the children available for adoption in the country.

We scraped the childrens’ photographs and biographical information from the two sites then used Rekognition, Amazon’s machine learning image recognition tool, to compare the images. The large size of the datasets (around 4,300 profiles from the Ukrainian site and 41,000 from the Russian one) meant that it would not have been possible to manually compare the images — that is more than 182 million potential combinations.

The facial recognition software flagged high probability matches, which the reporters manually reviewed using specially built tools. Potential matches were then sent to the Ukrainian authorities, who contacted the children’s relatives and guardians to confirm that the child shown on the Russian adoption website genuinely was the missing Ukrainian child.

The team had to address a series of data privacy and safeguarding concerns, made more acute because the investigation focused on children. Our reporters chose to work with the Ukrainian authorities to approach relatives and guardians because they were qualified to do the follow up work of trying to return the children to Ukraine. The story had significant impact. The White House released a statement in response to the findings, saying that the listing of Ukrainian children on Russian adoption websites was “despicable and appalling”. It added: “these Ukrainian children belong with their families. Russia is waging a war not just against the Ukrainian military – but against the Ukrainian people.” David Lammy, now UK foreign secretary, wrote on X: “this is a truly shocking violation of these Ukrainian children’s most basic rights.” Most importantly, the Ukrainian authorities are holding discussions with their Russian counterparts to return the children identified by the FT to their homes in Ukraine.