What we do
CHILDREN RETURNS
A humanitarian NGO based in the Netherlands and Ukraine, the Emile Foundation has helped return 50 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.
Emile specializes in the most complex cases, including children without legal guardians, children with severe disabilities, and children taken so young they can no longer identify themselves or remember their families.
Tracing children whose identities the Kremlin erased requires meticulous, painstaking work. To identify and locate these children, our investigations leverage human and open-source intelligence, back-channel and third-party mediators and extraordinary partnerships—including the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. Our team has also built our own proprietary humanitarian software to locate these missing children.
FAMILY SUPPORT
The Emile Foundation also resettles families from the war’s frontlines to safer territory while they search for their children. We provide legal support for parents to meet Russia’s evidentiary requirements to reclaim their children.
For retrieval missions, we support parents’ transportation to and from Russian-occupied territories or the Russian Federation. And we offer long-term financial, legal, medical and psychological support to help families rebuild after reunification.
Our operations · August 2026
WHERE WE WORK
From The Hague to the front line — and to every place a child has been traced.
Emile Foundation works along a single line: a legal and advocacy base in The Hague, an operational office in Kyiv, evacuation teams reaching families near the front line, and tracing work that follows children hundreds of kilometres east into occupied territory and Russia. All 46 located residents of the Oleshky boarding school are in one of the four places below. A further 23 cases remain unresolved.
Our bases
- The Hague, Netherlands Headquarters. Legal casework, international advocacy and fundraising, alongside the city's international justice institutions.
- Kyiv, Ukraine Permanent office, opened June 2026. Day-to-day contact with searching families, tracing work and coordination with Ukrainian authorities. Read about the Kyiv office
Where we evacuate from
- Frontline villages Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Kharkiv oblasts. We move the families of abducted children — often elderly grandmothers and relatives with disabilities — out of shelling range so they can keep searching. Why we evacuate families too
- Requests Families in frontline areas can ask for evacuation directly. Evacuation request
Where children have been traced
- 15 — SkadovskChildren's facility, southern Kherson Oblast, under occupation. All 15 confirmed by name.
- 27 — StrilkoveThe so-called Dniprovsk Psychoneurological Boarding School, occupied Kherson Oblast. 6 confirmed by name, the rest assessed with high probability.
- 3 — Penza, RussiaRoughly 1,140 km east of the school they were taken from.
- 1 — CrimeaOccupied since 2014.
15 + 27 + 3 + 1 = 46 located of the 69 Oleshky residents in our tracing caseload. 23 remain unresolved.
Distances are approximate straight-line figures. This diagram is deliberately schematic: it shows how far these children were moved, not a claim about any border.
Support the search Read the Oleshky findings
Last updated: . Source: Emile Foundation field investigation, June 2026.
RECOGNITION
The Emile Foundation’s humanitarian impact has been recognized by:
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Order of Merit)
- Ukrainian Parliament (Medal of Merit)
- Ukraine’s Ministry of Health (Order of Saint Panteleimon for Outstanding Humanitarian Service to Ukraine)
- Ukrainian Air Assault Forces (Medal of Honour)
- Institute of Women’s People’s Diplomacy of Ukraine (Voice of Peace through Values and Unity International Award)
- Human Economic Forum (Leader of Humanity Award)
HUMANITARIAN DIPLOMACY
Our CEO, Mariam Lambert, has engaged with world leaders through organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union, G20 Social Brazil, the Human Economic Forum and GLOBSEC, among many others.
She has presented our findings to the parliaments of Europe, the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands; met with many U.S. senators and members of Congress; reported to legislators in India and Brazil; and briefed UN representatives from more than 20 nations.
Mariam connects personally with government officials, spiritual leaders and people of conscience—meeting most recently with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and with the leader of India’s parliament.
IMPACTFUL SURROGATES
Emile’s Goodwill Ambassador program includes Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties and 2022’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Brazilian actor, author and Peace Ambassador Maria Paula.
PUBLIC AWARENESS
In 2023, the Emile Foundation launched the “Stolen Voices” project in The Hague—home of the International Criminal Court. Ukrainian children returned from Russia shared their stories of abduction and rescue for the first time, drawing significant international attention to the crisis.
Emile also pursues media coverage that centers the mothers of stolen children and their indefatigable battles to bring them home. Emile hosted a major 2025 press conference in Paris with seven Ukrainian women to share their struggles to reunite their families. We also joined a 2026 Kyiv press conference “Without A Trace”, hosted by Ukraine’s Crisis Media Center, on Russia’s mass abduction of children in residential schools for disabled and orphaned children.