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Russia Signals It Will Take More Ukrainian Children, a Crime in Progress
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s abduction and deportation of Ukraine’s children since its invasion of the country was so well-documented and terrifying that when Russian forces prepared to withdraw from the southern city of Kherson last fall, doctors at a hospital there hurriedly hid babies and...
news.yahoo.com
3.19.23
When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Friday over the forcible deportation of children, it was a powerful recognition of actions that have not only been carried out in full public view, but continue today. The arrest warrant adds Putin’s name to a notorious list of despots and dictators accused of humanity’s worst atrocities. But this case is unusual in that the charges were announced not years after the abuses began, but effectively in real time. The judges at The Hague cited the need for urgent action because the deportations are “allegedly ongoing.” The Russian authorities, far from disguising the deportations, have put the children on display in Red Square photo-ops and at lavish concerts celebrating the war. They have also signaled that more deportations are on the way. Across southern Ukraine, local Russian proxy leaders are issuing new “evacuation orders” before an expected Ukrainian military offensive this spring. Such orders have often been a prelude to stepped-up deportations. Russians are deporting more and more people from the temporarily occupied districts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Ukrainian officials said the arrest warrant highlighted the moral imperative of the conflict. “World leaders will think twice before shaking his hand or sitting with Putin at the negotiating table.” The court in The Hague also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, the Kremlin’s commissioner for children’s rights, who is the public face of the deportation program. She has spoken proudly about organizing a large-scale system for shuttling children out of Ukraine. After the arrest warrant, she vowed “to continue to work.” Putin, in a televised meeting with Lvova-Belova last month, noted the work approvingly. “The number of applications from our citizens regarding the adoption of children from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, from the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions is also growing,” he said. The scale of the deportations in Ukraine over the past year is something not witnessed in Europe in generations. The exact number of children separated from their parents or orphaned is not known. Russia has acknowledged transferring 2,000 children without guardians; Ukrainian officials say they have confirmed 16,000 cases. “The real, full number of deportees may be much higher,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said in a statement Friday after the announcement by The Hague.
As you read this, the kidnapping and deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia continues unabated.
Fourth Geneva Convention: Article 49: Deportations, Transfers, Evacuations:
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.