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One hundred orphans have arrived in Moscow: 77 children flew from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow on a Russian Aerospace Forces plane and 23 arrived by train from Kursk. The children’s ages range from 3.5 to 17 years. Some of them have disabilities. Custody of the remaining 25 children will be taken in the border regions of Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov.

Ten of the arrivals have already been transferred to families. The foster parents from Moscow and the Moscow Region came to pick them up. Legal representatives for these children and employees from the Office of the Commissioner for Children’s Rights helped them process the required documents on site.

Families will take custody of other children in the next few days. Two groups have already left Moscow for the Omsk and Samara regions. Maria Lvova-Belova will soon take two other groups to Murmansk and Nizhny Novgorod.

The children are being received by families from the Astrakhan, Voronezh, Kursk, Moscow, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Penza, Rostov, Ryazan, Samara and Chelyabinsk regions and from Moscow. The Commissioner for Children’s Rights agreed with the regional governors on their personal patronage of these families and the necessary support for them.

All the children have already received Russian citizenship and adoption or custody is conducted under Russian law. In addition, these children had an opportunity to choose a family in advance themselves. Initially, psychologists tested the children, and, most importantly, showed video passports of their would-be adoptive parents. Thus, every child could choose from three or four families. They communicated via videoconference and only then chose a family.

All orphans and children left without parental care lived for a long time in children’s homes and orphanages in the Donetsk People’s Republic. After the evacuation of these institutions from the DPR, they lived in temporary accommodation facilities in the Rostov and Kursk regions.

The adoptions or foster arrangements for these 125 orphans in Russia continued the programme started this spring. At present, about 300 children from the DPR are already in Russian families. One more group of orphans – 104 children from the Lugansk People’s Republic – are being prepared for arrival in Russia as well.

Earlier, Maria Lvova-Belova discussed the foster arrangements for the orphans and children left without parental care from the Donbass republics at a meeting with Vladimir Putin. The President supported this work.