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Russia signals it will take more Ukrainian children, a crime that continues

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KIEV, Ukraine — Russia’s abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children since it invaded the country has been so well-documented and horrifying that as Russian forces prepared to withdraw from the southern city of Kherson last fall, medics from a city hospital they rushed to hide the children and falsify their records.

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When Russian soldiers arrived, Kherson regional hospital staff said the babies were too critical to be moved, Olha Pilyarska, head of the neonatal anesthesia department, recalled in an interview on Saturday.

Smoke and dust hang in the air seconds after a Russian shell hit near the highway in a suburb of Kherson, Ukraine.  Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)

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Smoke and dust hang in the air seconds after a Russian shell hit near the highway in a suburb of Kherson, Ukraine. Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)

“They put devices of Pulmonary ventilation close to all the children,” she explained.

The efforts have saved 14 children from being kidnapped in a campaign that has systematically relocated thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia to be resettled in foster homes and set on the path to becoming Russian citizens.

When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against the president of Russia on Friday, Vladimir Putinfor the forced deportation of children, was a powerful acknowledgment of actions that were not only done in plain sight but continue to this day.

The arrest warrant adds Putin’s name to a notorious list of despots and dictators accused of humanity’s worst atrocities.

But this case is unusual in that the allegations weren’t announced years after the abuse began, but actually in real time.

The Hague judges cited the need for a urgent action because the deportations “are presumably underway”.

Although the court quickly issued arrest warrants before – against Muammar GaddafiIn Libya, for example, war crimes investigations often take years, meaning charges aren’t announced until long after the atrocities have occurred.

The President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashirwas indicted in 2009 for war crimes that began in 2003.

Destroyed civilian and military vehicles on a road leading out of the heavily destroyed city of Oleksandrivka, Ukraine on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. The International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against President Vladimir Putin highlights a practice the Kremlin has not covered up and says it will continue.  (Nicole Tung/The New York Times)

Destroyed civilian and military vehicles on a road leading out of the heavily destroyed city of Oleksandrivka, Ukraine on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against President Vladimir Putin highlights a practice the Kremlin has not covered up and says it will continue. (Nicole Tung/The New York Times)

But the Russian authorities, far from hiding the deportations, did exposed to children in Red Square and in lavish concerts to celebrate the war.

They also pointed it out there more deportations on the road.

Across southern Ukraine, local Russian leaders are issuing new “evacuation orders” ahead of a Ukrainian military offensive expected this spring.

These orders were often the prelude to increased deportations.

About a month ago, Russian forces closed all roads leading from occupied areas to the rest of Ukraine, making it extremely difficult for people to escape.

Now the only open roads lead into occupied territory or into Russia.

“Russians are deporting more and more people from the temporarily occupied districts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson,” the Ukrainian National Center of Resistance, the government agency monitoring events in occupied Ukraine, said on Friday, noting public statements by local Russian authorities .

After more than a year of a war that has turned into a bloody contest for resistance, Ukrainian leaders and allies face faltering, though still strong, support to continue supplying Ukraine with military hardware.

Ukrainian officials said the arrest warrant highlighted the moral imperative of the conflict.

“World leaders will think twice before shaking hands or sitting down with Putin at the negotiating table,” said Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, of the arrest warrant.

“It is another clear signal to the world that the Russian regime is criminal.”

Russia, which like the United States is not a party to the international tribunal, dismissed the arrest warrant as meaningless.

Its leaders have made it clear that they intend to do so continue to deport children to Russia in what they called an act of humanitarian compassion.

The court in The Hague has also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, the Kremlin’s commissioner for children’s rights, who is the public face of the deportation programme.

You proudly spoke about organizing a large-scale scheme to get children out of Ukraine.

After the arrest warrant, he promised “keep working”.

Putin, in a televised meeting with Lvova-Belova last month, spoke approvingly of the job.

“The number of applications from our citizens for the adoption of children from the Donetsk and Lugansk republics and Kherson and Zaporizhia regions is also increasing,” he said.

The scale of deportations to Ukraine over the past year is something not seen in Europe for generations.

The United Nations estimates that 2.9 million Ukrainians have moved to Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, but it’s impossible to quantify how many have stayed of their own free will and how many have been coerced.

About 700,000 children are included in that number, according to Russians and Ukrainians, and most are thought to be with their families.

The exact number of children separated from their parents or orphaned is not known. Russia has recognized the relocation of 2,000 unguarded children; Ukrainian authorities say they have confirmed 16,000 cases, though some of them could be with a relative.

“The actual and total number of deportees could be much higher,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday after the Hague announcement.

The court identified “at least hundreds of children taken from orphanages and childcare centers,” said Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor. He claimed that these deportations, carried out with the intention of definitively removing the children from their country, constituted a violation of the geneva convention and amounted to war crimes.

The Court in The Hague acted with unusual speed in this case.

It has come under close scrutiny since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when 43 countries – a third of the tribunal’s members – almost immediately demanded that it intervene.

Major donors, including the European Union, have sent money and dozens of prosecutors to streamline what is often seen as a slow bureaucracy.

And court investigators, who are often frustrated by hostile governments, received full cooperation from the Ukrainian authorities.

The forcible transfer of children from one national group to another with the intent to destroy it can also amount to genocide, a charge that Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, a Ukrainian organization that investigates child abductions he said he hoped was the next step.

Russia carried out the deportations under the guise of ransoms, medical rehabilitation initiatives and adoption programs.

But the facts have come to light thanks to eyewitness accounts, accounts in the New York Times and other Western media, Ukrainian media, independent investigators, the United Nations, and a multitude of governmental and rights organizations. .

“They committed the crime in full view and they were proud of it,” Stephen Rapp, a former ambassador general who led the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, said in an email.

The Kremlin has repeatedly used Ukrainian children as part of its campaign to bolster support for the war.

For example, when children in a foster home fled Russian bombing of Mariupol early in the war, they were stopped at a Russian checkpoint.

According to witnesses, pro-Russian media rushed to the scene and cameras followed the children as they entered Russian territory.

He introduced himself as a rescue operation.

“All Russian channels showed that Ukrainians are bad,” said Oleksandr Yaroshenko, a volunteer who witnessed the incident at the checkpoint.

In Chersonlocal officials and witnesses have described the orchestrated nature of the Russian abductions.

Shortly after Russian forces took the city, they worked with local partners to compile lists of children in hospitals, orphanages and schools, according to Ukrainian prosecutors and witnesses.

They showed security camera footage armed Russian soldiers enter an orphanage in October and local officials said 50 children had been taken from the facility.

Some of them, according to Kherson residents, then paraded in front of the cameras of the Russian state media.

The deportations have echoes of one of the most sinister chapters in Russian history, when Stalin used the deportations to consolidate control of the Kremlin.

At least from 1936 to 1952 3 million people they were taken from their homes along the western borders of the Soviet Union and other regions, and dumped thousands of miles away in Siberia and Central Asia, according to estimates by the United Nations refugee agency.

The Kremlin referred to these people euphemistically as “special settlers“.

At Kherson Neonatal Hospital, staff managed to save most of the babies, but two were taken away, said Inna Kholodnyak, director of the hospital.

“Some children from Kherson are still in the Crimea.

Sometimes we can see them in Russian media,” he said by telephone from the hospital, which has been bombed in recent days.

“The others just disappeared and we know nothing about them.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Source: Clarin

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