Ukraine has made it easier for people to adopt orphans, a Ukrainian official said Wednesday as the war-torn country celebrates Children’s Day.
More than 17,000 children in Ukraine need adoption, Kostiantyn Koshelenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister in charge of digital transformation, told Ukrinform news agency on Wednesday. The number has not been independently verified.
The number of potential adoptive parents is much lower, Koshelenko said, and attributed the problem to the complexity of adoption procedures in Ukraine.
A new digitized process allows a future foster parent to submit an initial consultation request in five minutes to the Diia mobile app. Applicants must be contacted within 15 days to set up a consultation, which can be done online or in person.
It was not immediately possible to determine whether the new process applies only to Ukrainian citizens or to foreign applicants. Mr. Koshelenko said that the Children’s Services of Ukraine will continue to work as before.
According to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, 282 orphans out of 706 have evacuated their children abroad or within the country since the beginning of the Russian invasion in late February. As many as 6,506 children were evacuated: 2,278 in other parts of Ukraine and 4,228 in other countries. At least 1,750 orphans and foster families were also displaced, the ministry said.
The Russian invasion has had dire consequences for children “at a scale and speed not seen since World War II,” the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund said on Tuesday. almost two out of three children in Ukraine have been displaced by the fighting. “The war has provoked an acute crisis of child protection,” Unicef said.