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Human traffickers of all kinds have landed in Ukraine with excuses ranging from the naïve to the most diabolical, to target vulnerable or unaccompanied children on the Ukraine-Poland border, say groups helping to evacuate orphanages in at-risk areas.
The aid group Aerial Recovery is made up of activists and US military veterans and says it has arranged for around 200,000 children to move from Ukrainian orphanages to foster families in Europe.
But many reports speak of chaotic situations and countless abuses in situations where no one is held accountable, while many of the unfortunate little ones have fallen prey to human traffickers.
Aerial Recovery, staffed by former US veterans who help people in dire humanitarian situations, says it is working with authorities in Ukraine to create a system to register the desperately high number of orphaned children in Ukraine.
“The government doesn’t have the capacity to deal with this problem,” chief of operations Jeremy Locke told the BBC.
The group is cooperating with the refugee charity ‘Salam’, but denounces that children brought to the border are being abducted by evil human traffickers of various kinds.
“Unfortunately they are easy prey because they ask for help. If you are an adult who has a shelter or food, they come with you, they don’t know any better”, said activist Martin Kvernbekk.
He adds that he has heard from various sources about missing children, human traffickers wearing luminous vests claiming to belong to aid organizations, or dubious aid organizations themselves that are not accountable for their actions.
“The perpetrators are very advanced, they are well-funded networks that do this regularly in times of war. They take advantage of the chaos and disorder to cruelly kidnap children and women”, adds the activist.
Kvernbekk adds that men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to leave Ukraine because they have to fight, except for men with three or more children, but checks are not precise at border crossings.
“There is no way to check if the man is a relative of the children, any human trafficker can do it,” he adds.
Earlier, the EU commissioner, Ylva Johansson, expressed concern about the poor situation of the children. “We have reports of criminals who take orphans from orphanages and cross the border claiming to be relatives of the child, but in fact traffic them.”
The Aerial Recovery group was discussing plans to create protocols and safe zones for children’s services, among which it said local authorities admit around 5,000 children are unaccounted for.
“Nobody knows what happened to them, either they were victims of war or they crossed the border with traffickers or people helping them in the wrong way,” Locke told the BBC.
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