On February 24, 2022, Russian Fuhrer Vladimir Putin announced the start of a full-scale invasion, justifying it as “denazification” and “demilitarization”. A year has passed and now we can talk about the true purpose of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
The occupier’s statements at the time did not convince anyone, and all civilized countries immediately gave the invasion an adequate assessment, calling it an act of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state.
Now, when many crimes committed during the occupation have become known, we know that the real goal of the Russians is not only the occupation of Ukraine, but the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Moreover, it is not only about war crimes committed by ordinary occupiers with the direct connivance of their commanders, but about a purposeful state policy on the genocide of Ukrainians, which is implemented by the entire Russian state machine.
One of the components of this policy is the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, bullying and assimilation in orphanages and educational institutions, and the subsequent adoption of these children by Russian families.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the forcible transfer of children from one ethnic group to another as a sign of genocide. According to incomplete data collected by the Children of War platform, as of February 2023, the Russian Federation had deported more than 16,000 Ukrainian children. These children later end up in Russian orphanages and Russian families, where they are brainwashed, thus assimilating.
Among the schemes used to abduct children from Ukraine, it is worth noting two:
- Removal of pupils from Ukrainian boarding schools located in the occupied territory. At the same time, the occupiers do not even care that some of these children are not orphans and have living parents in Ukraine.
The occupiers simply move the children to boarding schools located in the Russian hinterland, where they often become victims of abuse. This bullying, like the entire state policy of the Russian Federation, is aimed at ensuring that children assimilate and stop identifying themselves with Ukraine.
Later, these pupils are given to Russian families. To speed up this process, the Russian Federation even has a financing program for families that agree to adopt a Ukrainian child. Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian President’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, is responsible for this process, who herself “set an example” by “adopting” a 16-year-old boy from Mariupol.
- The so-called “medical scheme”. Children in the occupied territories are subjected to “medical examinations”, after which they are forcibly taken to the territory of the Russian Federation for “treatment” of fictitious diseases. Later, these children are distributed to various educational institutions in remote Russian regions. The only way for parents to take the child home is to go to the Russian Federation to pick it up. But it will not be possible to return from there to Ukraine, and not only the child, but also her parents are trapped.
However, recently a third option has been added, when the enemy takes Ukrainian high school students to the Russian Federation so that they take school exams on the territory of Russia. We are talking about 11th-graders who are taken away allegedly to prepare and pass the EDE exams. In the future, they are promised free education at universities on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Recently, such a case was recorded in Lysychansk, where the enemy took high school students to Yelabuga in Tatarstan. The goal of all these measures is the assimilation of young people, and therefore we are once again talking about the ethnocide of Ukrainians and the destruction of self-identification.
The National Resistance Center emphasizes that all perpetrators of genocide will be held accountable under international law. We also urge TOT residents not to allow Russian doctors to examine their children, so as not to become a victim of deportation.
