At the 80th UNGA, remember Russia’s war on Ukrainian children

The United Nations stands as a symbol of the shared hope for a better, more unified world. Russia’s abductions of Ukrainian children are an insult to that vision. The Kremlin may lie, but the world knows the truth.

Since Moscow launched its full-scale war against Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the Kremlin has carried out a cruel and cynical policy of kidnapping Ukrainian children in the hopes of turning them into Russians. So far, over 20,000 children have been abducted from Ukraine. Some are placed into online catalogues and offered up for adoption by Russian parents. Some have been forced into military training or subjected to sexual violence and detention.

Faced with the overwhelming evidence of this continuing war crime, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and ‘Commissioner for Children’s Rights’ Maria Lvova-Belova on 17 March 2023. Their crimes: unlawfully deporting and transferring children from Ukraine to Russia. Other organisations, including the European Union, have reported on and condemned the Kremlin’s covert policy of abducting children.

Here at EUvsDisinfo, we have also repeatedly covered Russia’s lies on the topic. Adhering to a grim but familiar pattern, Kremlin spin-masters and disinformation spreaders add absurdity to atrocity by projecting their sins onto Ukraine and Western countries.

With the 80^th UN General Assembly (UNGA) High-level Week just having wrapped up, it is unfortunate but fitting that we revisit how Russia’s leaders and their apologists have waged a foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI, campaign that proclaims its reverence for UN ideals while betraying them at every turn. Nowhere is that subversion more evident than how Moscow has treated the most vulnerable victims of its war: Ukrainian children.

Russia, the great denier

The first tactic, a blunt but dependable weapon, is simply to deny everything and to endlessly repeat that denial. This rejection of the obvious can bleed quickly into laughable rationalisations. So a commentator might claim that the 20,000 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and forced to learn Russian in Russian schools are comparable to Ukrainian children learning German in Germany, as if Russia’s full-scale invasion had not forced Ukrainians to flee to that country.

Russia, the great false protector

Typically, a second step is to allege that Russia has never kidnapped or transferred any children. Rather, it was simply evacuating them from combat zones. Their removal, Russia claims, was for their own protection.

Never mind that Russia’s invasion created those combat zones that Ukrainian children needed evacuation from. The problem is that evacuations from conflict zones, particularly of children, must comply with international humanitarian law. In particular, Article 78 of the Additional Protocol of the Geneva Conventions stipulates that children cannot be relocated to a country other than their own and their parents must consent to any evacuation. Russia has not followed any of these rules. Instead, Russian authorities and military personnel have taken children without their parents’ consent, forcibly transferred them to Russia, and prevented family reunification in all but a few cases.

Russia, the great indoctrinator

Russia’s FIMI campaigns occasionally claim that Moscow is working hard to unite children with their families through mediators including Qatar and the Red Cross. The Russian branch of the Red Cross is a deeply suspect organisation that narrowly avoided suspension by the International Red Cross last year.

More importantly, Russia refuses to provide full lists of deported children or details of their locations. Numerous investigations by credible journalists and international bodies have documented forced adoptions, name changes, and citizenship conversions imposed on Ukrainian children. The evident goal is identity erasure: turning Ukrainian children into Russian children, even to the point of giving them military training and using them to fight for Russia against Ukraine.

Remembering the spirit of the UNGA

Despite Russia’s denials and false narratives, the truth endures. Russian forces are abducting innocent children, forcing adoptions, erasing identities, and training some to fight in the war. The world knows.

Last month, thirty-eight countries as well as the Council of Europe and the EU called upon Russia to immediately and unconditionally return Ukrainian children. On the sidelines of the 80^th UNGA High-level week, Ukraine and Canada held a summit of the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children, an initiative the EU joined on the same day, to highlight the issue and maintain pressure on Russia to put an end to its barbaric practice of abducting another nation’s youth.