If you read Maria Lvova-Belova’s social media, you might think that Russia is selflessly rescuing Ukrainian children from evil and placing them in the care of Russian families desperate to share their love.

But according to the US and European governments, and a new report by Yale researchers, backed by the US State Department, she is at the center of a Russian government plan to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian minors to Russia, often to a network of dozens of camps, where the minors undergo political re-education.

“Maria Lvova-Belova is one of the figures most implicated in Russia’s deportation and adoption of Ukrainian minors, as well as the use of camps to ‘integrate’ Ukrainian minors into Russian society and culture,” he wrote. the Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory’s Conflict Observatory.

Lvova-Belova, who was appointed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s commissioner for Children’s Rights in 2021, created her Telegram channel days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Between photos with the high sphere of Russian power, from Putin to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, passing through the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, he publishes photos and videos where he highlights the wonderful life that they supposedly offer Ukrainian children.
“By the end of the week, one hundred and eight orphans from Donbas who have received Russian citizenship will have parents,” Lvova-Belova wrote in a typical post on her Telegram channel last July, using the Russian spelling for the Donbas regions of Ukraine ( Donetsk and Luhansk). “Shurochka was the first to be handed over to her mother. When I heard the laughter of this happy child, I couldn’t hold back [the tears].”

Lvova-Belova regularly visits Russian-occupied Ukraine, and the Russian government boasts that she personally escorts planeloads of children returning from Ukraine. Putin has empowered Lvova-Belova to use unspecified “additional measures” to identify children without parental care in the four Ukrainian regions she claims to have annexed.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Organization, has stated that “adoption should never take place during or immediately after emergencies” and that during upheavals it cannot be taken for granted that children separated from their parents will be orphans. In addition, the UN considers that forcibly transferring the population of another country within or outside its borders is a war crime.

Russia has called reports of forced removals “absurd” and said it is doing “everything possible” to keep the children with their families.

In another typical post, from December, Lvova-Belova distributed photos sitting at a table with a Russian family in the Kaluga region.

“I’ll be frank, I was crossing the threshold with concern: how have they settled in, do they have everything they need, how have relationships with parents and other children in the family worked out?” she wrote. “But all doubts were dispelled in the first minutes. The family is wonderful.”

“For me, this is further confirmation that the work we have done in placing orphans in Donbas is not in vain. Everything has been done well.”

The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom have sanctioned her for her alleged role in the plot. “Lvova-Belova’s efforts specifically include the forced adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families, the so-called ‘patriotic upbringing’ of Ukrainian children, legislative changes to speed up the granting of Russian Federation citizenship to Ukrainian children, and the deliberate removal of Ukrainian children by Russian forces,” the US Treasury said in September.

She revels in the designation.

“My thanks to the British for the attention they have paid to our mission to help the children of Donbas,” she wrote in June. “In Russia we enjoy friendship as families, as organizations and, from now on, as affected by sanctions.”
From guitar teacher to politician
Lvova-Belova is the mother of at least ten children, some biological and others adopted with her husband, who is an Orthodox priest.

Lvova-Belova was born in the western city of Penza. She began her career as a children’s guitar teacher. She over time became involved in local politics, working her way into the Russian power structure.

In a sad television report published on her Telegram channel in November, Lvova-Belova recalled the adoption of a Mariupol teenager, who she said had been put on the street by foster parents after his mother died of cancer.

“He is the most beautiful person I have ever met in my life,” Filip says of his adoptive mother. “I never had anyone who loved me as much as she did.”