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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Ms Lvova-Belova, we are meeting on the eve of Children’s Day. There is nothing more important than children, not only for any family, but also for the state. You are doing a very important and noble work.

Where do we start?

Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova : Mr President, I am very pleased to see you.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Allow me to report on the office’s performance and share a few proposals we have prepared.

I would like to sincerely thank you for the Year of the Family project and for your executive order on supporting large families. In fact, we are now witnessing the revival of large families spanning several generations in Russia. This is the ultimate goal guiding our efforts across the board, both within government bodies and society as a whole. The office of the Children’s Rights Commissioner focuses on the family by definition, because we understand better than most that a family is the most important thing a child can have.

My team has travelled extensively throughout the country. In every region, I made an effort to meet with large families. I inaugurated the Year of the Family project in the Nenets Autonomous Area, where I visited a chum that is home to a large family with ten children and ten grandchildren. Their everyday life is amazing, and I believe we have much to learn from them. They always help and support each other. The boys herd the reindeer, and the girls help the adults in the chum. They know that there is no other way to survive in the tundra.

Vladimir Putin: How can one chum have enough space for so many people?

Maria Lvova-Belova: It is true that they all live in one chum. That left a lasting impression on me.

During a meeting with large families in the Tambov Region, I was approached by a mother of many children, whose eldest child has a disability and uses distance learning. Mr President, according to the relevant executive order, her son will be entitled to his official status until the age of 23, but only if he is a full-time student. However, we both realise that physically attending school can be challenging for young people with disabilities. Therefore, I believe it would be fair to extend the eligibility for these children until the age of 23 without the full-time education requirement, so that this family can retain their status until the boy turns 23 regardless of the format of schooling.

Vladimir Putin: This makes sense, especially if a person is unable to attend classes in person.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Yes, exactly.

Vladimir Putin: All right, good. I agree.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Domestic tourism is actively developing in our country, and our large families would like to travel as well. But we understand that our hospitality services are not always ready for accommodating families with many children. Take our hotels, for example: it is quite difficult to comfortably accommodate a family with five children even in two rooms.

Therefore, we propose establishing a badge of quality for accommodating large families in the hospitality industry. This would allow us to see where large families can travel and where they would be welcome, as well as adjust our hospitality infrastructure to the needs of large families.

Vladimir Putin: Agreed.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Mr President, people are seeking our assistance more and more often. The number of such applications increased by 21 percent to 14,587 last year. We regard this as a mark of public recognition and trust, which comes with a high level of responsibility. I would also like to add that we received 3,500 applications for targeted humanitarian assistance from our new regions.

Vladimir Putin: A growth of 21 percent, you said?

Maria Lvova-Belova: Yes, and we hope that this indicates public trust.

Every time we travel to the regions, we focus our attention on the families which are facing the removal of a child, especially a small child who is in great need of love and care.

We are grateful to you for supporting our initiative to prevent social orphanhood among children aged up to four years. We have launched it in 14 pilot regions, where we did our best to help return children from orphanages to their families or to prevent children from being sent to orphanages from problem families.

We have created a system with services and clubs where such parents can turn for support, as well as consult specialists. But the main task is to change our mentality, Mr President. Removing a child from the family should be the last resort. We must take every possible measure to save families.

In the past nine months, as many as 1,411 kids have been placed with families, mostly their own families, and only a small number of children have been placed in foster families. The number of children living at orphanages simultaneously has decreased by 18 percent. We are currently monitoring 4,500 families in the pilot regions.

According to our information, there are 58,000 children in our orphanages, including 32,000 orphans, while the rest have living parents. But the number can rise above 200,000 if we include the children who are living in problem families, where their health and lives can be at risk. Consequently, we understand that the issue of social orphanhood calls for deeper analysis and more attention.

If we look at history, we will see that in the 1990s our main task was to remove children from the streets and to place them in orphanages. In the 2000s, we focused on placing them in foster families; there was a special programme for this. I believe that the time has come for us to shift our focus to biological families and to start working actively towards this end.

Mr President, speaking of the economy, I visit regions, and the annual costs of supporting one child at an orphanage are at least 1.2 million rubles. Some regions spend 3.5 million rubles. In effect, we realise that huge expenses are incurred. Each child is eligible for social guarantees, including a flat, free tuition, social benefits and so on. At the same time, a child remains an orphan without near and dear people.

In some cases, a family, in fact, needs very little assistance. I arrived in one of the regions, and I saw three children at a local orphanage. I learned that their mother was living in the countryside at a home with a defunct stove. The authorities took her children to the orphanage, and they have been living there for four months already. They have spent over one million rubles on them to date, and that stove costs 90,000 rubles. Mr President, this is not right, and it is our task to do everything possible for supporting the family and preventing this. We have already intervened, the children have reunited with their mother, the stove has been fixed, and we continue to address this situation. Mr President, considering the fact that …

Vladimir Putin: I wonder, where did this happen?

Maria Lvova-Belova: I am not very eager to let that region down.

Vladimir Putin: Look, these are not jokes, and this is a disgrace.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Mr President, in reality, this practice is commonplace.

Vladimir Putin: Tell me, where did this happen?

Maria Lvova-Belova: This happened in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Vladimir Putin: All right.

Maria Lvova-Belova: We agreed with the newly-appointed governor that he would address this matter, and that we would change the system completely. They have now appointed a commission there after my visit, and after we exposed such cases. This is not a violation, Mr President. A child may be staying at an orphanage, due to problems in his or her family. Also, the administration of an orphanage and guardianship agencies have committed no violations.

Vladimir Putin: The agencies should have contacted local authorities. Instead of taking the children away, the latter should have responded accordingly.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Of course, this is important, and we need to attend to this very important matter. The Governor and I have conceived an ambitious project for preventing social orphanage. To prevent a repetition of such incidents anywhere and seeing the results of our programme for little children, I would like to ask you to approve the expansion of this programme, so that it would assume a nationwide scale, and to increase the age limit of children to 18 years where they run the risk of ending up at orphanages.

There is another important aspect I wanted to highlight. Regions diverge in terms of their practice in applying the law, as well as in terms of subordination and the way their ministries and agencies coordinate their efforts. There is also a disparity in terms of the statistics, budgets and staffing. This means that every region sings its own tune. This is a matter of grave concern for me.

But when we started looking into these matters, it turned out that every agency pursues its own objectives. Let me give you an example. We came to a region and headed to an admissions department in an infant orphanage. There was a newborn who just arrived there. “What happened to the baby?” I asked. This was the response I got from the staff members: “Our task is to look after children and take care of them.” I said: “Fine, let’s refer this question to the guardianship and custodianship services, the social services. What’s going on with the baby and her family?” “The mother is going to give up this child because there are some health problems.” I also asked healthcare institutions about what was going on with the child and the family. “We do not know anything about the family, but the child does have health problems,” they said.

We asked the mother to come and see us. She was from a rural area and had two children already. Nothing extraordinary about her. “I gave birth to a child with a deficiency – she lacks the ear auricle,” she said. We were all sitting there, and I said: “What kind of ear do you want for your baby? Do you want a big one, or a smaller one, or maybe an elf ear?” She looked at me, perplexed: “Can we actually do that?” We took them on board and reached out to the relevant specialists. The Russian Children’s Clinical Hospital performed the prosthetic surgery and now the baby is on her way back home to be with her older brothers.

This is just to say that every institution has its own functions but together, they fail to focus on what families actually need.

Vladimir Putin: They lack coordination.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Indeed. Mr President, you have been raising this issue all the time. The custodianship services took the child from the family, deprived it of its parental rights and stated lack of proper housing and poverty as the reason for doing this. What a stone-age approach. This should have never happened. And why do they need to take away children if a family experiences housing problems? Why not offer it temporary housing or launch a renting programme, all while working with the family and investing in it?

There is also the staffing issue. Mr President, in one case, there were as many as 85 employees serving five children. It goes without saying that they were not interested in transferring these children back to their families. Of course, they were willing to go to great lengths to retain them because this is the role the state assigned to them.

Therefore, Mr President, I think that it is high time that we put all these things straight and address these issues. I am ready to contribute to this effort. May I ask you to instruct us to undertake a national audit of the child protection services, the commissions on minors and prevention services? We will need a year to draft a report and put forward proposals on reforming this system.

Vladimir Putin: You can raise this issue with the Presidential Executive Office. And I will issue a separate instruction to this effect.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Thank you so much. Mr President, we will clean up these Augean stables once and for all. We cannot carry on this way, can we?

Vladimir Putin: We must move in this direction, to say the least.

Maria Lvova-Belova: We must give it a try, of course.

Vladimir Putin: Very well.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Thank you so much.

You supported our initiative on payments to children who were mutilated by Ukraine’s attacks. We are now in contact with the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection and the Social Insurance Fund. Overall, 206 children have already received payments. Most of them – 111– come from the Donetsk People’s Republic. The rest come from our new regions and border areas – children were moving across the country and received payments in their locations.

We have a small issue linked with children who received medical aid in mobile hospitals. They did not have any medical documents with them and could not confirm this. Now we are trying to improve this mechanism. I am sure we will find a way out.

We continue working on children’s reunification with their relatives during the special military operation. As you instructed, we are helping children who have parents or other relatives with full rights to them. Of course, we do not deal with all cases – some families reunify without our involvement but all difficult cases are our responsibility. We have reunited 70 children with relatives in Ukraine.

I would like to note that children in Russia mostly stayed with their relatives. They rarely got into institutions. Thus, on one occasion a mother came but died and we had to send her child to her sister in Ukraine. Or when a granny wanted to take her grandson from the Kherson children’s home, she could not confirm their kinship and we arranged a DNA test for her.

Vladimir Putin: But they all understand that children found themselves in Russia because we were saving them from shelling in the zone of hostilities.

Maria Lvova- Belova: Mr President, the situation is like this. When they talk to me personally – since I always try to take part in these contacts – I hear one kind of rhetoric. Once they cross the border with Ukraine, they start singing a completely different tune. They complain how difficult everything was and how they were held back. We are also carrying this work with our Russian partners – the FSB Border Service, our regions, and international partners – international representatives of the Red Cross, the State of Qatar, Vatican, and the Border Service of the Republic of Belarus.

At this point, I would like to talk about a separate subject. It concerns the State of Qatar, our international mediator. They just fulfill the function of fixing that it happened and how it was done, and that indeed the situation did not involve any aggression. I must say that we returned six children to Russia from Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin: I had the following question. Are our children returning from abroad?

Maria Lvova-Belova: Yes, six children. But Ukraine keeps silent about this because in this case it will be clear immediately that this is not connected with our seizure of children but is linked only with ongoing hostilities and family situations. Thus, quite recently, three children were returned to a Belgorod family.

Vladimir Putin: All right. Never mind! These are all political games but the main thing is for children to return to their relatives, for families to reunite and be happy.

Maria Lvova-Belova: Of course, of course. We act in the best interests of children, Mr. President.

Vladimir Putin: All right.

Maria Lvova-Belova: We are doing what needs to be done.

A few words about the State of Qatar. We held the first direct talks with Ukraine in its capital of Doha. We recorded a list of 29 children, Mr President – not thousands and not tens of thousands as they claim – but just 29 children and returned 6 of them already.

Vladimir Putin: All right. But you should keep this work away from politics. It should be strictly humanitarian.

Maria Lvova-Belova: We are doing it in the interests of children. This is exactly what we are doing.

Supporting children with disabilities is very hard work, but I will only mention one part of it, the day care centres we are opening now. You have approved this project so that families can leave their disabled children for several hours there like in after-school groups, getting some rest while their children associate with their peers.

This is particularly important for the new regions. When we opened such a centre in Lugansk, one mother told me: “My child is a wheelchair user, but I cannot even take him outdoors because of the shelling attacks. I will not be able to run away with him. So, we had to stay indoors all the time, but now I have a place where we can go. I can have some free time, and my child will have an additional opportunity for development.” This is why we continued with this project this year. We have announced a grant contest, and we will help another 15 regions open such centres.

Mr President, it can be such a big impetus. Of course, we cannot open all such centres, but we encourage the regions to take relevant efforts, because it is an effective support measure.

Now to my favourite subject, the teenagers. Over the two yeas we have been working in this sphere, we have greatly changed public attitude to this group of children. We have opened 80 large teenager centres of a new type where they can spend their free time. What is more important is that many regions have started opening “teenager corners” in shopping malls, libraries and clubs, where children are taken care of and can associate with their peers or play table games, instead of roaming the streets where we fear they would not be safe.

When we opened such corners, we thought that only teenagers would come there, but it turned out that parents were interested as well. And now 900 organisations have so-called Parent Lounges where we teach parents how to communicate with their teenage children, how to react to their actions and spend time with them.

As for children who have problems with the law, you once told us that it was a good cause and allocated the necessary funds, which allowed us to hold sessions with a thousand teenagers. We are pleased with the result. We also used it to compile aids for specialists and to draft a programme.

Vladimir Putin: Where do you hold these sessions?

Maria Lvova-Belova: We have held them in all administrative districts for a thousand teenagers, and now we have forwarded the programmes to the regions.

Vladimir Putin: Three sessions?

Maria Lvova-Belova: No, we are only making these plans now. We have held nine sessions, and we are planning three federal sessions and a separate session in each region based on our recommendations and documents.

This year, we will focus on supported employment for teenagers. We joined forces with job vacancy platforms to form a special vacancy database for teenagers. On the one hand, we should encourage employers to give jobs to teenagers, especially during summer vacations. On the other hand, we must ensure the teenagers’ safety, so that employers act as responsibly as possible and understand why we are doing this.

We worked jointly with prosecutor offices to formulate a standard of responsible employment based on many elements, and we are now working out the details in the regions. In other words, we are cooperating with large employers where teenagers are given jobs.

I would like to discuss career guidance separately. We are working with Roscosmos on it. In order to bring back the romantic appeal of space exploration of the 1960s, we have decided to start with the younger generation, and we are drafting a number of projects to this end.

With regard to supporting children from the new regions, we are holding sessions for teenagers and their families. Almost 3,000 children have taken part in our programme. Our main goal is to provide psychological support for these children, because everyone who has been hiding in bomb shelters taking cover from regular shelling since 2014 is affected by the post-traumatic syndrome. Children come here with a supply of bread, because they are afraid there will not be enough food. They hide water bottles under their beds, because they are afraid they will run out of water, and keep charging their phones.

In order for us to be able to handle this, we are training specialists on the ground and have developed a psychological programme with our leading university for the children to be able to cope with the difficult period they are going through.

Vladimir Putin: The trauma is serious if they have been sitting in the basements since 2014, as you said, no doubt about it.

Maria Lvova-Belova: We will work on it.

We continue to help the new regions. I travel there regularly, and we work on it with the heads of the regions. Importantly, two days ago, I approved a commissioner for children’s rights in the Kherson Region, so we now have it covered in full: we have advisers on children and commissioners in the regions. We are addressing social orphanhood, helping restore institutions and staff, raising the level of specialists, and improving the legal and regulatory framework.

With regard to helping the families of the participants of the special military operation, the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation and the Committee of the Fatherland Warriors are doing a lot in this regard.

Vladimir Putin: Do you maintain contact with them?

Maria Lvova-Belova: Yes, we maintain very close contact with them, but I still try to meet with families during my travels, and my commissioners do as well. We address specifically certain issues that affect children and families in general. Not long ago, we had a house of a family with seven children repaired in the Belgorod Region, and they are waiting for their father to come home from the special military operation in a decent house now.

Despite the sanctions, we continue our international cooperation in conjunction with the Foreign Ministry, and I will briefly touch on two aspects of it.

Our children, whom we are bringing back from Syria upon your instructions – we brought back 123 children this year – are undergoing rehabilitation. We are integrating them into Russian realities on all matters related to education and social help.

We have also started to work in Africa, too, which you supported last time we met. We have humanitarian projects underway in Kenya and Congo. We are opening computer classes, medical laboratories, and poultry and agricultural farms for the families to support themselves.

I have outlined the key areas of focus. I look forward to you supporting our work in the future.

Vladimir Putin: I will. Thank you for doing this work.