This Russian organizes deportation of Ukrainian children Iranian security forces fire on demonstrators – reportedly 13 killed

What was good for the Nazis is now good for Vladimir Putin. The Russian president openly allows and encourages the deportation of Ukrainian children to Siberia. They are torn from their homeland, sometimes also from their families, and are severely traumatised.

According to current UN conventions, ratified by Moscow, this clear war crime includes genocidal intent. Significantly, the Kremlin is by no means concealing this child abduction, which is in violation of international law. Putin’s “Commissioner for Children’s Rights”, Maria Lvova-Belova, explains on Russian television that she has “evacuated” and “rescued” children at risk from cities such as Mariupol or Kherson.

The mother of several children speaks explicitly about the benefits of “re-education”. Putin’s confidante herself adopted a 16-year-old youth from Mariupol. With a teddy bear in her arms, she told a TV camera that the children from the bombed-out city had sung the Ukrainian national anthem when they were taken out of the basement; But now her attitude has changed to “love for Russia”.

From the Ukrainian side, reactions can be read on Twitter such as: “She also looks like Goebbels’ wife.”

From holiday colony to horror

A group of French scientists, authors and Ukrainianologists were among the first to publicize and denounce this mass abduction. In August, they published a letter in the Paris newspaper Le Monde entitled: “Deporting and ‘Russifying’ Ukrainian children means depriving Ukraine of its future.”

Co-signer Sylvie Rollet, film expert and head of the Paris association “For Ukraine, for our freedom and theirs”, explains to CH Media why it is a real deportation. It affects Ukrainian war orphans, but certainly not only. Many children are separated from their parents in the Russian “filtration centers”; others never returned from “vacation settlements” in the Russian-occupied territories.

According to Rollet, they are transported to Russia along with other isolated minors, where they are sometimes divided into the most remote regions of the country, such as Novosibirsk, Murmansk or the border with North Korea. The family members left behind only know exactly where they are going when the children manage to call them.

It is very difficult to say how many children have been kidnapped. The French collective assumes 300,000. However, this number also includes children who were and are being shipped to Russia along with their families. The number of children abducted without parents is likely to be a fraction, but still more than the 11,000 named children who were deported alone, according to the Ukrainian government’s “Children of War” website.

The range of these numbers says a lot about the inability to understand the scale of these cynical war crimes against children. Putin coolly creates the preconditions:

Shot in kindergartens

Oleksandra Romantsowa of the Center for Civil Freedom – which received the Nobel Peace Prize in October – explained at the press conference in Paris how Russian soldiers promote the deportation of Ukrainian children: “They shoot first at kindergartens, schools and orphanages; then they pretend to take the kids to a place safe from the shots. It is often more than a thousand kilometers away in eastern or northern Russia.”

French-American writer Jonathan Littell was asked at the same press conference whether the Putin clan’s behavior was reminiscent of the widespread deportation policies of the Stalin era. Littell’s response: “It reminds me more of the actions of the Nazis against Poland.”

At that time, 50,000 to 200,000 Polish and Slavic children with blond hair and blue eyes were abducted to Germany and assimilated there.

Only the motive is different today: the Nazis engaged in “Aryanization”, Putin follows the concept of “Russification”, as evidenced by his adoption decrees. Sylvie Rollet: “In the end, Putin wants to wipe out Ukraine with his ‘special operation’. He denies their past, their cultural traditions and their state legitimacy. The ‘Russification’ of Ukrainian children is part of this policy.” (aargauerzeitung.ch)