In the years after Argentina’s military dictatorship, many of the 500 children who had been stolen and raised under false identities began to come forward, looking for their families.
The efforts of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo showed what it takes: persistence; collective, even dangerous, action; and the use of biological data to trace family ties. In fact, modern identity and kinship testing emerged in large part from the group’s work, led by Mary-Claire King and others in the 1980s.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been similarly separated from their families and communities and taken into Russia or Russian-controlled territories. No one yet knows the full number. Some children have been placed in institutions and others in foster or adoptive homes, often with changed identities and little or no contact with their families.
Thanks to the Abuelas’ work 40 years ago, we now have the scientific tools and processes to help Ukrainian children find their families and cultural roots when they come forward. Some will come forward in months or years. Others may not know the truth for decades. They may come forward with partial memories or with DNA test results from consumer databases or with nothing more than a question they cannot ignore. When they do, their ability to find answers will depend on what we build now.
The Abuelas’ sustained efforts led to creation of a national DNA system; Ukraine’s government has also developed DNA systems. However, policies that limit DNA data sharing and the movement of samples across borders make such work harder. At the same time, the scale of the war has stretched forensic resources thin, with nearly 100,000 Ukrainians missing or unidentified since 2014. The result is an absence of focus on finding the close or distant relatives of the disappeared children.
And yet, they will come looking.
But grassroots action in Ukraine is limited. The number of families that have come forward does not match the number of children reported missing. Tens of thousands of children have been documented by human rights groups as having disappeared, yet there is little visible, community-level effort to find them. Fear, displacement and the conditions of war likely keep many families from coming forward.
Reunification begins not only with technology but with trust.
More Top Picks Evolve Gt Bamboo Street
Families of the missing are the central actors in any future reunification effort — like the Abuelas were in Argentina. Sustained community engagement is essential: listening to their concerns, being clear about how information is collected and used, and respecting the real risks they face. In Ukraine, as in other conflict settings, trust is fragile, shaped by histories of surveillance, politics and fear that information shared could be used against them. Without that trust, families will not participate, and without their participation, no system will work.
Ukraine is not alone. Our team’s research, funded by Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, has been researching the systematic barriers to ethical uses of DNA in cross-border family reunifications. We have found reports from Syria that also describe conflict-related child separations. Children are displaced, absorbed into new systems or lost across borders with little documentation. Many will grow up cut off from their families, communities and cultures. Families are left searching, often with few leads and real fear of the regimes involved with the disappearances. This is why we must work as a global community to build systems not just for today or for specific countries, but also for years and decades to come.
The time window for documenting biological ties is already narrowing as families are displaced, records are lost and children grow older. Every month that passes without coordinated systems increases the risk that connections will be lost. The absence of a system today becomes the absence of answers tomorrow, not just for the families but also documentation of the human rights abuses.
We just observed International Missing Children’s Day on Monday. Recognition alone is not enough. The world must stop treating these separations as temporary wartime tragedies and begin preparing for the long search that many families may face. The DNA technology is established. Now, governments and international organizations can cooperate to build and support trusted, long-term systems that can help separated children reconnect with their families years and decades from now. We must learn from the Abuelas and respond to this and other global tragedies with sustained commitment and community engagement.
We know what comes next. The Ukrainian children will come looking. We are not prepared.
Sara Huston is a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. She is founder of the nonprofit DNA Bridge and co-lead of the Global FamDNA Working Group at the Roberta Buffett Institute.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].