More than 60 detectives used digital open source techniques to trace the missing children who are understood to have appeared in Russian propaganda.

They used advanced facial recognition to find recent images of the children online.

Network data analysis was then able to establish whether multiple children were in the same location.

Detectives at the EU’s police agency are not revealing either the identities or the whereabouts of the eight children who’ve been tracked down using open source intelligence, citing potential risks to their safety.

The government in Kyiv estimates that at least 19,500 Ukrainian children have been deported and forcibly displaced from their homes to Russia and Russian-occupied territories since the full scale invasion began in February 2022, and of those only 388 have returned home.