The Verkhovna Rada has officially asked international organizations and parliaments of other countries to condemn Russia's crimes of abduction and Russification of children after the occupation in 2014. When the war first knocked on the door, few people wondered where orphanages from the uncontrolled territory disappeared to and what happened to minors who bought a one-way ticket to the camp in Gelendzhik.
A major shift in the topic of overly tolerant and silent organizations occurred only on March 17, when the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin and his children's ombudsman, war criminal Maria Lvova-Belova.
Once a humble charity worker, mother of many children, and wife of a Russian Orthodox priest, she has become a symbol of occupation, genocide, and Nazi-style concentration camp practices.
Maria periodically bragged about how she successfully collected batches of orphans in the destroyed Mariupol and sent them to the most remote corners of the Russian Federation. I think we all understand what happened to the closest relatives of the children who were sent to the Kaluga region on this flight.
One of the stolen teenagers became the personal war trophy of an 'Orthodox mother.' The child thief told a heartbreaking story about how the boy's relatives had put him and his bag out on the street during the airstrikes on Mariupol. But at one point, the weaving of lies broke down - it turned out that the phones of the boy's father and stepmother were not answering. Their house in Mariupol was destroyed to the ground and is to be demolished. This means that the teenage orphan was simply stolen. And his identity was erased - Philip received a Russian passport, and the “I am a mother” boasts that he will be a future judge.
Back in April 2022, the State Duma was discussing how to set up Russian language camps. They claimed that children stolen from Donbas and southern Ukraine do not speak Russian well enough to master the Russian school curriculum and enroll in the junior army.
Maria Lvova-Belova became known in Russia in the early 2000s when she created the non-profit organization for sick children without parental care, Louis. But like any true Russian on the Ukrainian issue, she turned out to be a pure imperialist.
As soon as the court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Mother Maria, she denied all charges. She said she had children. But there are no phone numbers of their relatives. Parents are not interested in them. So we rescued children from the shelling. And we took them by air to Russia.
Last summer, Putin issued a decree on simplified Russian citizenship for underage Ukrainians. And this is a story that resembles a ticking time bomb with a future. Because no matter how the war ends for the Russian Federation, and even if the stolen child remembers his or her Ukrainian childhood, the junior army, Russian school, and foster parents, Orthodox alcoholics and pedophiles, will break him or her. They will change him. And they will make him hate his native land. Five hundred years ago, aggressive propaganda forced Christian children of Serbs and Bulgarians to be completely loyal to the Ottoman Empire.
I do not rule out that the stolen boys will become infantry for the Russian army in the near future, and our girls will become Orthodox spouses who will become a conveyor belt for militarized meat.
In a stunning interview with American Vice, a true Orthodox Russian woman explained the line of defense of Kremlin officials in the most painful issue of all: child abduction.
Firstly, she publicly admitted that she had stolen a group of orphans, namely 31 children from Mariupol basements.
The second argument is the cynical statement that the Ukrainian government did not take care of the evacuation of orphans from Mariupol. Yes, our government and the local authorities of this city have a lot of questions about how the 500,000-strong border city was prepared for a major war. But we remember very well the attacks on maternity hospitals, the police and the State Emergency Service specifically to ensure that as many children as possible died or became commodities for Russian export.
The third is the extortion that several thousand children from Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv regions were abducted after their parents were misled into believing that “it would be better for minors to sit out the war in a cozy sanatorium in the Russian Federation.” It's hard to say what exactly motivated the parents who waved their children away. But in the end, if your parents are far from geniuses and a bit of an infusoria in political matters, this is no reason to turn you into a fierce Muscovite without the right to a bright future.
Further, speculation on the topic of “my grandmother is from Vinnytsia region” is now a favorite argument of any Putinist, liberal, and propagandist: to look for one's Ukrainian roots and say that everything is not so clear.
“I am accused of a criminal offense, as the judges say, for the forced removal and deportation of children, but in fact it was an evacuation from under fire. What is the genocide of the Ukrainian people? We have a fairly large proportion of people in Russia with Ukrainian blood,” Maria Lvova-Belova wonders in an interview.
Family and blood ties are the basis on which Russians have speculated in order to promote the thesis of fraternal ties with Ukrainians in the West. Sometimes, when a Ukrainian and a Russian are judged together for an international award, it still works. But now, after the devastation and tens of thousands of deaths, it smells more and more like a farce. And cynicism.
And most importantly, the favorite theme of every Russian, good and bad, to appeal to childhood in Artek, singing Ukrainian songs, probably played a factor in the numerous Ukrainian migrant workers and the peace-friendship-bubblegum rhetoric.
“We have always sung songs in Russian and Ukrainian, we have told Russian and Ukrainian fairy tales, we have always lived in friendship and understanding. And in Ukraine, they are now erasing everything related to Russia,” Maria Lvova-Belova lamented to the American audience.
The Russians and the inhuman system will keep Ukrainian children hostage to the last. This is a story for decades to come. And we must honestly admit that not everyone will be found. Some may be forgiven in a way that the current ghouls with Ukrainian roots a la Dmitry Kozak, Basta, Sergei Glazyev, and Sergei Kiriyenko are not.
We need borders with Russia right now and here, no matter what Natalia Moseichuk, Oleksii Arestovych, and other short-sighted seekers of Russian followers say about it. Otherwise, raids on our cities in the hope of replenishing resources for new janissaries will be endless. Proven by a simple Russian woman, a mother of many children and wife of a Moscow priest, Maria Lvova-Belova.
About the author: Maryna Daniluk-Yarmolaeva, Ukrainian journalist.