Ukrainian children who had been illegally deported to Russia have arrived in Belarus, where state media published photographs showing them waving Belarusian flags and flanked by riot police. The 48 children come from the occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, which Moscow claims it has annexed. In photos published on Tuesday, the children were shown holding the red and green state flag of Belarus, surrounded by police and riot police. According to the state news agency Belta, the children “thanked” the Belarusian authorities. Thousands of children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year. According to the Ukrainian government, 16,226 children have been deported to Russia, of whom 10,513 have been located, and more than 300 have returned. Some fear the numbers of missing could be an underestimate. Officials in Belarus have previously denied allegations that the country was involved in the illegal removal of children from Ukraine. But on Tuesday, Belta reported that the removal of the children from Ukraine was organised by a Belarusian charity – supported by the president, Alexander Lukashenko – that has previously organised health programmes for Ukrainian children in Belarus. “The president, despite external pressure, said this important humanitarian project should continue,” Alexei Talai, the charity’s head, told the state news agency. He said “all the Belarusian people” want to help “children from dilapidated cities and towns in the new territories of Russia”. In June, Belarusian opposition figures gave the international criminal court (ICC) materials that they said showed more than 2,100 Ukrainian children from at least 15 Russian-occupied Ukrainian cities had been forcibly removed to Belarus with Lukashenko’s approval. Pavel Latushka, a former Belarusian culture minister, hopes the material will prompt the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for Lukashenko, as it did with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “We are seeing more and more evidence relating to the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children to Belarus and this will continue until international organisations react and stop Minsk,” Latushka told AP. In March the ICC in The Hague indicted Putin and the Russian children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the mass abduction of Ukrainian children. The alleged abductees include children taken from Ukrainian state institutions in the occupied areas, children whose parents had sent them to Russian-run “summer camps” from which they never returned, children whose parents were arrested by the Russian occupying authorities, and children who were orphaned by the fighting. Belarus has been Moscow’s closest ally since the Russian invasion began in February 2022, when Lukashenko allowed the Kremlin to send troops and weapons into Ukraine from Belarus. Russia has also deployed tactical nuclear weapons there.