Vladimir Putin wants to wipe us off the map, warns Ukrainian tennis player Elina Svitolina

RRussian President Vladimir Putin is waging war in an attempt to wipe Ukraine off the map, the country's best tennis player has warned.

Elina Svitolina, 30, accused Russia of genocide and urged the West to help return about 20,000 Ukrainian children deported to Russian camps since Putin's invasion in February 2022.

According to the Ukrainian government, more than 70 camps used to forcibly re-educate children have been found throughout Russia, Belarus and occupied Crimea.

Svitolina stunned the sporting world in 2023 after beating world No. 1 Iga Swiatekin in the Wimbledon quarter-finals just eight months after giving birth to her daughter.

Now an ambassador for the charity Bring Back Kids UA, she saidThe independent: How we feel as Ukrainians is that the Russian government wants to erase us from the map.

By taking our territory, by stealing our children and firing missiles at us. This is genocide and they are trying to do it in different ways.

Svitolina is married to French tennis player Gael Monfils, who was ranked sixth in the world in 2016. She gave birth to their daughter Skai just a few months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022.

She added:As a mother, this work is very important to me. The children are our future. We must take action to bring them back.

It is a terrible issue that we have here in Ukraine. We have to do something about it. It is not acceptable in our world.

After reaching the semi-finals in 2023, Svitolina said: I think the war made me stronger and also made me mentally stronger. I think having a child and the war have made me a different person. I look at things a little differently.

In 2023, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said that the Ukrainian children found themselves in a completely pro-Russian environment after being removed from their homes.

They are exposed to a pro-Russian information campaign that often amounts to targeted re-education, the organization added.

The OSCE investigation shows that the Russian Federation is not taking steps to actively promote the return of Ukrainian children.

This is despite the fact that the right of return is enshrined in the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Children during War.

Instead, the OSCE found out [Russia] creates several obstacles for families trying to get their children back.

In June,The independentspoke to five teens who weretaken to Russia or Russian-occupied territories before eventually being rescued experience abuse and humiliation.

Russian authorities have made it easier to adopt a Ukrainian child, change the name and give him a Russian passport.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner for children's rights, in connection with the deportations.

The Kremlin has denied the allegations of deportations, claiming that children have been moved to areas outside the combat zones. It dismissed the arrest warrants as meaningless.

Mykola Kuleba, CEO of Save Ukraine, a charity dedicated to the return of the children, said: Russia is stealing our future. They base their strategy on deception, indoctrination of children and genocide of the Ukrainian nation.

Children are prohibited from speaking Ukrainian or showing Ukrainian symbols. Children are severely punished if they resist the singing of the Russian national anthem.

Save Ukraine has returned 373 children, including 88 orphans, Kuleba said, adding that many returnees showed signs of trauma.

On Friday, nine children from Luhansk and Donetsk were sent back to Ukraine and to a Qatari-brokered deal between Kiev and Moscow.

Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said the children ranged in age from 13 to 17, with a 20-year-old man also involved in the operation.

Several suffered from disabilities and some of them had been transferred from an orphanage in the southern Kherson region, first to the Russian-occupied city of Skadovsk and then to Russia itself, Mr. Lubinets said.

Several of the returnees lost one or both parents in the war and were handed over to their grandparents, the commissioner said.

We are always ready to bring children home on a large scale, but the Russians will do everything they can to slow down the process, Lubinets said on national television.

Mr Lubinets said Qatari authorities were in negotiations to bring more children home and that he had handed them a list of 751 children who had completed paperwork for their return.