Name: Russia’s forcible deportation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children
Start: 2025-02-21T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-02-21T12:00:00+01:00
Location: Jekteviksbakken 31, 5006 Bergen, Norway

$Russia\u2019s forcible deportation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children$

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, citing the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children.
Over 19,000 cases have been documented so far, while Russia claims to have "evacuated" over 700,000 children. To date, 388 children have been returned to Ukraine. These forcible transfers are accompanied by systematic re-education and indoctrination efforts in the Russian language and ideology.
Forcible deportation, ongoing since the start of Russia's aggression against Ukraine in 2014, is not a new phenomenon but is deeply rooted in Russia's colonial practices. Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language were targeted under both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
This event will highlight the forcible deportation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children by Russia, examine accountability under international criminal law, including the Genocide Convention, and provide a historical perspective on Russia's colonial policies.
The panel, moderated by Dr. Liliia Oprysk, will feature:
Dr. Yulia Ioffe, Associate Professor in Law at University College London (UCL),
Dr. Gaiane Nuridzhanian, Associate Professor in Law at The Arctic University of Norway (UiT),
Dr. Svitlana Arabadzhy, Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Oslo (UiO),
Dr. Ingunn Lunde, Professor of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen (UiB).
Programme
10.00 - 11.30 Panel discussion
11.30 - 12.00 Lunch (please register using this link: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=18296098).
Not in Bergen? Join us online: https://uib.zoom.us/j/61022768554?pwd=cw0IvGHeaZCoThDPN4L7deRMjPkSLm.1
Speakers
Dr Gaiane Nuridzhanian is an international lawyer from Ukraine. She works as an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at the UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. She holds an LLM degree from University of Cambridge and a PhD in law from University College London. Dr Nuridzhanian specialises in international criminal law and human rights. She has previously worked as a lawyer at the European Court of Human Rights and the International Advisory Panel on Ukraine (Council of Europe), and as a Visiting Legal Professional at the International Criminal Court. Dr Nuridzhanian is a co-author of the article ‘Understanding Russia’s Actions in Ukraine as the Crime of Genocide’ published in Journal of International Criminal Justice in 2023 (available in open access https://doi.org/10.1093/jicj/mqad018)
Dr. Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen. Her research interests include sociocultural linguistics, language policy, East Slavic medieval culture, and contemporary Ukrainian literature. She is the author of Verbal Celebrations: Kirill of Turov’s Homiletic Rhetoric and its Byzantine Sources (Harrassowitz 2001), Language on Display: Writers, Fiction and Linguistic Culture in Post-Soviet Russia (Edinburgh UP 2018) and Fragmenter av fortid: Historiens rolle i russisk samtidslitteratur (Dreyer 2019) and editor/co-editor of twelve books. She was managing editor of Scando-Slavica (2016–2022) and is founder and editor-in-chief of the book series Slavica Bergensia (2000–). Lunde is actively involved in outreach activities for Norwegian audiences, ranging from public talks and feature articles to podcasts, panels, media appearances and interviews. She is also a literary translator from Ukrainian and Russian into Norwegian.
Dr. Yulia Ioffe is an Associate Professor in Law in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR) at University College London (UCL). Before joining UCL, Dr. Ioffe was a postdoctoral fellow in children's rights law at Queen Mary University of London and a researcher in international refugee law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Dr. Ioffe also clerked for H.E. Judge James R. Crawford at the International Court of Justice and worked at the UNHCR Representation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UNHCR Regional Representation for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, and a New York litigation firm.
Dr. Svitlana Arabadzhy is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, and an Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology at Mariupol State University, where she teaches a course on the history of the Greeks in Ukraine. Her current research project “Becoming Greek South of Ukraine, 1774-2021: The History of Ukraine through its Greek Minority Between Local and Transnational Contexts (UAGREEKS)”, has received funding through the MSCA4Ukraine project and is financed by the European Union. She is currently working on a monograph on the history of Mariupol as a Port City.