Orcs kidnapping children
https://tvpworld.com/85797256/russia-abducting-ukrainian-children-to-forcibly-turn-them-into-russians-says-reportRussian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s commissioner for children are wanted by the International Criminal Court for systematically kidnapping Ukrainian minors, but they deny any wrongdoing, claiming that Moscow has only removed youths from warzones for their own safety.
However, the ISW says that human rights activists have found official documents dated February 18, 2022—just days before the Kremlin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine—that “laid out plans to remove Ukrainian children from orphanages in occupied Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts” under the guise of humanitarian acts.
This is one of those particularly dumb talking points that has been echoed endlessly since the war began
What exactly is Russia supposed to do with children in an active war zone? Those rescued from villages in the front lines got brought to Russian orphanages or put with foster families or otherwise given temporary protection. And agencies both in the west and in Russia helped locate living family members
outside of the war zone, and Russia reunited those children with the families. And then western sources took a victory lap claiming they were repatriating kidnapped children, even though Russia was just actively attempting to reunite kids with families.
Think logically about the whole thing.
Why would Russia give a shit? When you believe in dehumanizing propaganda that all Russians are orcs and they eat the flesh of babies sure you might think they are kidnapping them to make kiddy casserole. Back in reality, Putin has nothing to gain from orphaned kids, and a humanitarian and PR reason to rescue them.
All I need to deconstruct this story is to simply present the arguments made by both sides in the conflict. Here, verbatim, are the accounts from the CBC and Russia Today:
Quote
Ukraine estimates Russia has taken 19,546 children from Ukraine since it invaded the country in February 2022, and only 1,243 have been returned home.
Kuleba suspects the full number of missing children could be more than a million over the last decade of conflict between the two countries.
These children, he says, are forcibly separated from their families and put in orphanages, foster homes or adopted into Russian families.
Others, he says, are sent to "re-education camps" where they are taught pro-Russian propaganda and are forbidden from speaking their native language.
"We call these death camps for Ukrainian identity," he said. "It's like ethnic cleansing for our kids."
Quote
Russian authorities have regularly reported on the efforts undertaken to reunite displaced Ukrainian children with their families. Last month, Lvova-Belova announced that 17 children from 11 families had recently been reunited with relatives in Russia, while 95 more – with relatives in Ukraine and other countries under a Qatar-mediated agreement with Kiev reached last year.
She has repeatedly called Kiev’s claims of abductions a “systemic myth” and pledged to continue facilitating family reunifications. Russian officials have also stressed that displaced children are not adopted in Russia but placed under temporary guardianship or foster care until they can be returned to their families.
One of these is a logical and reasonable narrative, one of them is basically blood libel. One is for people who try to figure how the world actually works and what measures self-interested geopolitical actors take during times a war, the other reduces the conflict to bloodthirsty orcs against righteous heroes.