Child kidnapping by Russia

 One little known story of the Spanish civil war was that Russia kidnapped Spanish children to raise them as communists.

the Wikipedia article frames it as keeping the children safe in a time of war (as were many thousands who were taken in by France etc) but if you read down the article the real reason is noted:

Communist propaganda portrayed them as the future political elite in a Spanish socialist republic which would emerge from victory in the Civil War. The children and their families believed that their time in Russia would be short, and in their later testimonies they confirm that they were happy with the adventure of travelling to a foreign country.

the evacuations of children during war is controversial because of the separation from family and culture, yet the alternative might be a dead child.

Yet the high casualty rate in the Spanish children in Russia suggests that safety was not the real issue.

So fast forward to the Russia Ukraine war, where again Russia is kidnapping Ukrainian children claiming they just wanted to keep them safe.

From StrategyPage:

September 19, 2026: Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has kidnapped nearly 50,000 Ukrainian children and sent them to Russia to halt its population decline...

 

The Russian government developed a formal system to obtain children. The easiest method was to find young, orphaned children, from infants to 7 or 8 years old, and send them to Russia to be adopted. When Russian troops took some populated Ukrainian territory, special filtration teams were sent in to find any children they could kidnap without meeting violent resistance from families or neighbors...

 

What is most unusual about this use of children as hostages to pacify occupied regions is that it is happening in Donbas, which has been under Russian control since 2014 and initially supplied troops for the 2022 invasion. As that invasion went badly and got a lot of the Russian soldiers killed or wounded, the surviving volunteers from Donbas refused to fight any longer....

One underreported story about getting these children back to their families is the work of Melania Trump.