On the territory under Ukraine's control, two more children have been successfully returned.
This was announced by the head of the Kherson Regional State Administration, Oleksandr Prokudin.
"Another Ukrainian family is finally on free land. We managed to extract from the occupation an adoptive family where two children, deprived of parental care, were raised. These are boys aged 13 and 15," he said.
According to him, they are all currently safe under the supervision of doctors and psychologists.
Prokudin added that since the beginning of this year, 40 children have been successfully returned to the territory under Ukraine's control.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been deporting Ukrainian children on a regular basis to annexed Crimea, Belarus, or remote regions of Russia.
The deportation of Ukrainian children prompted the International Criminal Court in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the Russian children's rights ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023 for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children.
Ukraine manages to repatriate deported children from Russia, but this process is quite challenging.