StrategyPage discusses the control of information to the Russian occupied provinces of the Ukraine, and in the middle mentions this:
over a million Ukrainians have been exiled to Russia and over 50,000 children sent to Russia, some to be adopted by Russian couples.
I had assumed the number to be much lower, and that these were kids who needed to be cared for, and indeed the numbers involved are very vague and differ widely. And of course, there is so much propaganda out there about the war that I simply stopped reading stories. However, since SP gets the story correct about countries I personally know about, I would trust their story.
The alleged abductees include children taken from Ukrainian state institutions in the occupied areas, children whose parents had sent them to Russian-run “summer camps” from which they never returned, children whose parents were arrested by the Russian occupying authorities, and children who were orphaned by the fighting...Russia has admitted to holding at least 1,400 Ukrainian children it describes as orphans
this WaPo article from last June quotes a Ukrainian official saying
According to Ukrainian Permanent Representative to the U.N. Sergiy Kyslytsya, more than 234,000 children had been transferred to Russia by early June.
this article compares it to the stealing of children from executed political prisoners in Argentina. Of course because it was a "right wing"regime.
but of course, Russia has done this in the past: Wikipedia page on the children kidnapped from Spain during that Civil war, and the abduction of children (or was it the rescue of orphans) by all sides during and after World War II.
Were the children rescued from a bad situation, or from a war torn area, so they could be safe? Were they in orphanages so could be considered without families (although often they had parents who simply couldn't afford to care for them, or who were injured or imprisoned for crime or as political prisoners)?
It is one thing to condemn Russia for ''kidnapping" these children: it is another thing to put it into perspective of what was the alternative for these children?
(and defending Russia here is not the same as not condeming their expansion of the war to get more territory than the Crimea which historically was never Ukrainian).
So were these children adopted by families who wished to care for them? Were they adopted to be used as cheap labor? or was it a political ploy, to retrain and trained as sleeper spies in their native country?
So was this kidnapping of children from orphanages or whose parents were absent (humanitarian) or a form of ethnic cleansing?
as for anecdotal stories of mistreatment by the survivors: Take this with a grain of salt because often the children resented the new parents, in the way that older adopted chidren hate the adoptee parents and blame them for all sorts and sundry things.(not the birth parent, who are dead or worse drug addicted and incapable of caring for them). In psychiatry this is called projection.
In summary, the story is unclear, and maybe it is a cynical way for Russia to increase the number of ethnic Slavs into a Russia that has a low birth rate, but what was the alternative for these children?
Uh, maybe stop the war and compromise with Russia? SunTsu points out that never block an enemy, but give him a way to get out to flee... but if you read the US MSM cheering section, they want total loss by Russia, and the heck with those suffering from the war.
And wars cause refugees and orphans. So do physical disasters, disease (HIV and Covid), population displacement from internal unrest, and poverty. There are also a lot of children cared for by relatives, some of whom end up on the street because the granparents/relatives get sick, die, or just don't care.
This is the side effect of a world economy that encourages the imporation of cheap labor to affluent countries, or the economic pressures that encourage parents to migrate to work in far away cities or overseas to support their children.
In rural areas, the children have the protection of extended family, but in large towns and cities, often the children end up on the street, becoming drug addicts (to forget their misery) or criminals or both.
Street children are especially vulnerable to sexual predators including many from affluent countries who travel to poorer countries to prey on these children. (one of the reasons that independent African countries pass laws against homosexuals by the way: a legacy of both slave traders and of colonialism where the troubled sons were shipped off to another country to prey on locals).
When I adopted my sons, our parent support group was warned that many of our children had been sexually abused, even those who were young children. Indeed, I know my sons had suffered physical abuse, but my older son was so full of anger I wonder if he had been sexually abused too.
There are millions of street children in the world: of families in the slums where the father is absent and the mother's new husband doesn't want them, or maybe of kids who are wanted and loved but the parents can't feed them, so the kids beg, steal or go through garbage to eat, or submit to sexual predators to make money to eat. Often when they are older, they join criminal gangs and often get addicted to drugs as a way to cope.
Wikipedia page on street children (seems out of date).
Sigh.
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