Melania Works with Putin to Reunite Families

First lady Melania Trump announced Friday she helped reunify in the past 24 hours eight Ukrainian children with their famly members who had been cruelly abducted during Russia’s war with Kyiv — and expects to bring back more thourgh an “open channel” with Moscow and President Vladimir Putin.

“A child’s soul knows no borders,” the first lady said in poignant remarks during her closely held announcement in the White House grand foyer, sharing heart-wrenching stories of kidnappings that had divided Ukrainian families for the better part of the more than three-year war.

The eight children were among thousands who were separated from their families during what the Kremlin called “evacuation” procedures in Ukraine — but were actually forced deportations.

Many were ripped away from their families or orphanages during the chaos of the first year of the war, when Russian forces occupied areas in eastern Ukraine.

Whole boarding schools were also emptied out and the kids loaded onto buses before disappearing without a trace.

Some were even later put on a twisted adoption database where they can be sorted by age, eye and color, and number of siblings, in what non-governmental humanitarian groups have characterized as “digital child trafficking masked as bureaucracy.”

The forced separations earned Putin an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in March 2023.

Ukraine has struggled to locate and repatriate the children kidnapped by Russian forces since the beginning of its full-scale invasion in 2022, with officials saying at least 19,500 children remain unaccounted for, but the actual number could be far higher.

Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska told The Post in an August interview: “The children who come back are subdued mentally — they’re broken. … Only after they return do they start coming back out of their shells.”

Russia has now agreed to rejoin the Ukrainian children who turned 18 years old over the course of the war, with their families, the first lady said Friday, hinting that “plans are already underway to reunify more children in the immediate future.”

The Kremlin has scattered the kidnapped children to more than 200 facilities across Russia to undergo pro-Russian “re-education” and military training, according to a recent report by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.

Others have been forcefully adopted by Russian families, according to Zelenska, making their return even more difficult.

Melania Trump wrote a letter to Putin addressing the issue that was delivered at President Trump’s Aug. 15 Alaska summit with his Russian counterpart and “much has unfolded since President Putin received my letter,” she said.

Putin replied to her letter and “since then President Putin and I have had an open channel of communication,” the Slovenia-born former fashion model said, describing “several back channel meetings and calls” that have taken place.

“My representative has been working directly with President Putin’s team” to connect children and their families, Melania Trump said.

She also discussed the issue with Zelenska — who leads Kyiv’s “Bring Back Kids” initiative to return children kidnapped into Russia — during a 20-minute meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last month.

“For all Ukrainians, this is one of the most heartbreaking consequences of this war,” Zelenska said of the kidnapped children in an interview with The Post in August. “We could not protect their rights when the Russians took them — without consent, without records, without any transparency.”

During their tete-a-tete, Zelenska thanked Melania for her efforts to help return the Ukrainian children to their families, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the US Olha Stefanishyna exclusively told The Post.

“What was important for Madame Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, was to give some words of gratitude to the first lady for her soft power and for her messages,” she said.