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STOCKHOLM: Researchers at a Yale University lab in the United States claim they have located Ukrainian children allegedly abducted by Russia with the help of satellite imagery. “We have uncovered 210 re-education and military camps housing some of them,” the lab’s director said.
The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) was tasked by the US State Department in 2022 with assessing the number of children allegedly displaced by Russian authorities and the scope of the phenomenon, explained lab director Nathaniel Raymond during a visit to Stockholm for a seminar on the issue at Sweden’s parliament on Monday.Initially, Raymond thought the task seemed impossible.
“How do you find concealed kids protected by Russia’s security services? In a kidnapping case where all we have is the internet and satellites?” he said.
The answer came after a gaffe by the Russians: local Russian officials posted selfies of themselves with some of the Ukrainian children.
“Local officials wanting to curry the favour of the Kremlin took over-the-shoulder selfies of them on the buses with the kids.”
“The super funny part of the story” is that they forgot to deactivate the geolocation services on their phones, Raymond said.
“And so we extracted the latitude and longitude of the position of the officials when they were taking a selfie,” he explained.
“And then we began to see in the photographs that we could identify the devices, including their Apple watches. And then we started to dig,” he said.
The information they got was shared with Ukrainian authorities.
Since then, by analysing all other available information, including official photos published by Russian authorities, the HRL has uncovered the existence of 210 re-education and military camps across Russia, where some of the children are being held.
The lab estimates that a total of around 36,000 children have been abducted by Russia.
The fate of these children should be a top priority in the current negotiations aimed at ending the conflict, Raymond stressed.
Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2025
