Heartbreaking story: Reporters established contact between a girl stolen by Russia and her mother in Ukraine. New York Times in: “Using Adoptions, Russia Turns Ukrainian Children Into Spoils of War
Thousands of Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russia.
“As Russian forces laid siege to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol this spring, children fled bombed-out group homes and boarding schools. Separated from their families, they followed neighbors or strangers heading west, seeking the relative safety of central Ukraine.
Instead, at checkpoints around the city, pro-Russia forces intercepted them, according to interviews with the children, witnesses and family members. The authorities put them on buses headed deeper into Russian-held territory.
“I didn’t want to go,” said Anya, 14, who escaped a home for tuberculosis patients in Mariupol and is now with a foster family near Moscow. “But nobody asked me.”
Reporters told Anya and Oksana how to contact each other. The prospect of Anya returning home, though, is unclear. Ukrainian officials have been tight-lipped about how they have gotten dozens of children back from Russia.
“Is this really her number?” Anya asked.”
According to some Russian officials, more than 7,000 children were taken from Ukraine by Russian authorities, for “adoption”. This falls in the category of genocide, as defined by the United Nations. Right, “whataboutists” will smugly bleat that Canada and Australia engaged in children mass kidnapping on an ethnic basis, as recently as the 1960s, 1970s. Yes, that was genocide, but they tried to hide it. The Kremlin is massive and blatant about it.
The Kremlin subjugated population has been collapsing. The population under control used to be around 300 million, now the Kremlin controls less than 145 million. Besides replenishing itself with water, arable soil, and minerals, one aim of the nuclear tyrant is to replenish his population. Hence the perverse state pedophilia (love of children) of the Kremlin. Forcing children to become slaves torn away from all their roots is not just a political crime, and a well-defined genocide, it’s also a neurological crime.
New York Times: “When children had nobody to call, or when parents were unable or unwilling to brave the journey to Donetsk, the children were given no choice.
While Ivan was waiting for the headmaster to pick him up, he said, the other children were put on a bus for Russia. They protested. “No one listened to them,” Ivan said. “They had no choice.”…
Anya and others described a wrenching process of coercion, deception and force as children were shipped to Russia from Ukraine. Together, their accounts add to a growing body of evidence from governments and news reports about a removal-and-adoption policy that targets the most vulnerable children in the most dangerous situations.
Transferring people out of an occupied territory can be a war crime, and experts say the practice is especially thorny when it involves children, who may not be able to consent. Ukrainian officials accuse Russia of perpetrating a genocide. The forced transfer of children, when intended to destroy a national group, is an act of genocide under international law.
Russian officials have made clear that their goal is to replace any childhood attachment to home with a love for Russia.”
The New York Times found a woman from Siberian city of Salekhard, a terribly cold place on the Ob river by the Arctic ocean, with trees no more than 4 meters tall, when they exist. The woman was in the process of acquiring her fifth Ukrainian child….
Olga Druzhinina said she adopted four children, aged 6 to 17, from around the Ukrainian city of Donetsk more than 1,600 miles away. Russia recently illegally annexed the Donetsk region and three others in eastern and southern Ukraine.
“Our family is like a small Russia,” Ms. Druzhinina said in an interview. “Russia took in four territories, and the Druzhinin family took in four children.”
She said she was awaiting a fifth child and considered the children fully Russian. “We are not taking what is not ours,” she said.
That Siberian woman who stole four Ukrainian children lives in a city which saw the murder of 300,000 political prisoners under Stalin (who himself killed six million Ukrainians in 1932, and Stalin did this deliberately as he said in writing:” Causing themselves war with a vengeance, dear comrade Solohov!” [1]). When one has lived all of one’s life in Kremlin regimes which killed, stole and abused people industrially, it is natural to be oneself a killer, an abuser and a thief, and believe all of this to be normal, highly moral behavior. And she dares to say, speaking of children from another country and other families: “We are not taking what is not ours”.
This is our tragedy in Russia today. We are all in the situation of suffering from a population which has learned from childhood to live in a brutalizing country. Because, thanks to nuclear weapons, the danger from the perverse Kremlin mentality extends all over.
The Kremlin is teaching, even preaching, deliberately, the violation of basic human rights to the entire planet: this is why, differently from the Nazis, the Putinists are not hiding their malfeasance. Thus they boast of forced children “adoption” and the removal of entire civilian populations (both war crimes). When the Soviets did similar things, for example in Ukraine in 1933, they hid what they were doing.
Putin does not hide, because he wants to invert all of the world’s moral values. He is doing a good job: many regimes approve of him, and one could see the former president of China, Hu, forcibly removed from the greatest assembly, by Xi’s bodyguard, because Hu objected to the dictatorship of Xi. Xi as declared “eternal friendship” with Russia (until he overruns Siberia in general and Vladivostok in particular).
In general, worldwide, it has become a question of survival of humanity to make it impossible for oligarchies to control the world. All the more as they got to such powers from having the worst hearts.
Putin and his oligarchs thought they had the West, the democracies, under their thumbs: they could rob Russia blind, and invest in, and thus control, the West (Obama, US president to Russian president, in 2012, on a hot mike:”Tell Vladimir I will be more free after the elections“… free to stab democracy in the back…) They underestimate the Ukrainians, who have seen it all, and who, like the Jews, suffered in a similar way, and found the one and only similar solution: tanks.
Genocidal regimes don’t necessarily lose… But when they won, as they did most recently in the US, Canada and Australia, they did so against primitive, neolithic populations. Progress is one: we don’t steal children, because we teach them well, and the first thing we teach is that people are not property. Well taught children can grow up to make excellent tanks, as Putin is finding out.
Patrice Ayme
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Stalin fuller quote: “ …the respected farmers of his district, and not only his, have led protests and sabotages, and were ready to leave workers and the Red Army without bread! The fact that one commits a silent sabotage yet appears loyal and peaceful (without bloodshed) is a fact that does not change anything about the affair, those respected farmers have searched for a way to depose Soviet power. Causing themselves war with a vengeance, dear comrade Solohov!” (The Black Book of Communism).

P/S: I commented and was blocked by the NYT. Perhaps, because of the essence of what I said, that, using the examples provided by the NYT itself, the Russian population has been brutalized, and thus brutalizes… When brutality is all one knows, it’s all what one reproduces… Or maybe it was my use of the word “pedophilia”. How did I dare call Putin a pedophile? Am I being disrespectful with the would-be murderer of all of humanity? Just because he loves to kidnap thousands of children?
What always surprises me with NYT censorship is how refined, paying attention to the smallest detail, and how drastic it is.
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P/S 2: On Otober 22, 2022, it transpired that Russian authorities in Krasnodar Krai have “indefinitely” extended the “vacations” (meaning forced abductions as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign) of children from Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast…