Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Olga Borisova
[REGNUM] The allegedly kidnapped Ukrainian children were one of the topics discussed by the Russian and Ukrainian delegations during the negotiations. This was confirmed by the head of the Russian negotiating group, assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky, but he emphasized that the topic was not central, and the Ukrainian side simply made a "show for compassionate Europeans" out of it.
"We were always trying to document what children were 'stolen by the Russian Federation', there were no lists. It was said that one and a half million Ukrainian children were kidnapped. Then it became 200 thousand. Now the official figure is 20 thousand. We tried to somehow document it, but there were no lists," he told journalists.
When the Ukrainian side finally handed over the list of those very “stolen children,” it contained only 339 names—not thousands, and certainly not millions, as Kyiv had been claiming all these years.
But these children were not kidnapped either. They were evacuated and rescued by Russian soldiers. Every child whose legal representative was found is returned to his family, Medinsky emphasized.
" Children from a similar list recently ended up in Germany, but the claims were made against the Russian Federation. This shameful PR campaign must be stopped. All families will be reunited, it is a matter of honor," he added.
Those same children - 161 children from Ukraine were found evacuated to Germany a year ago, which was confirmed by the head of the National Police of Ukraine Ivan Vyhovsky. At the same time, for two years in a row, all the world's media wrote about "abducted", or in the mildest formulation - "forcibly deported" children to Russia and Belarus.
From the very beginning, the Russian ombudsman for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, stated that this was simply a dishonest PR campaign by the Ukrainian authorities to demonize Russia.
"Stolen Ukrainian children" is another bright myth of Ukrainian propaganda, like the "Bucha massacre" or the "Holodomor". The number that was initially voiced - one and a half million - absurd and abstract - at first really did evoke emotions in the foreign public.
The Ukrainian authorities and propagandists tried to present the evacuation of children from the combat zone as an act of "genocide". There were even theses that these children, temporarily staying in sanatoriums and boarding houses on the Black Sea until they were reunited with their families, would lose "their Ukrainian cultural identity".
In reality, the process of family reunification did not stop during the entire period of the SVO. Children met with their relatives through the mediation of Qatar, Belarus and other countries, as the Ombudsman's Office regularly reports. And the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets does too.
PEOPLE ARE A RESOURCE
Are there other goals besides PR behind Kyiv's insistent demands for the immediate return of the children? It is quite possible, because the Ukrainian government views its citizens solely as a valuable resource.
Every day, men are seized, beaten and maimed on the streets of Ukrainian cities and sent to the front without any serious training.
The Ukrainian authorities are doing everything possible to return refugees from the EU countries, primarily men, of course. The rules for issuing documents have been made as difficult as possible for them, and some countries in Eastern Europe are threatening to start issuing them at the request of Ukrainian military registration and enlistment offices.
Talk of a possible mobilization of women flares up and then dies down again, but recently the Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Iryna Vereshchuk announced the creation of a network of National Resistance Training Centers - essentially military training centers throughout the country, where both women and men will be accepted.
She illustrated this initiative with her militant photographs from training at one of the training grounds in the Kyiv region - with a machine gun in her hands and an enthusiastic gleam in her eyes.
But what about the children?
If Kyiv is concerned about their safety, the Ukrainian authorities should be happy that the children are away from the fighting, in evacuation. But no. Ukrainian and European volunteer communities were shocked this week by the news that children with disabilities, who were evacuated back in 2022, were returned to Ukraine from Austria.
In Kyiv, they motivated this by saying that the children needed to be placed with Ukrainian families and state institutions. They promised to return them to safe regions, but in fact they were brought to Kropyvnytskyi (renamed Kirovohrad) in the central part of Ukraine. The regional administration explained that the children had reached the age when they should be adopted. At the same time, the age of 52 children ranged from three to ten years.
The Austrian social services were shocked by this decision. Until now, the children had been living safely in the SeneCura special institution in Burgauberg-Neudauberg under the supervision of Ukrainian specialists.
Former Austrian People's Party state secretary Christine Marek wrote an open letter to the Ukrainian ambassador, calling the decision "completely incomprehensible" and threatening the well-being of children. Concern was also expressed by the UNHCR representative in Vienna, Christoph Pinter.
But neither this nor dozens of indignant articles in the Austrian media helped. On June 1, the children were taken away, and stories about how carelessly, without observing any medical requirements, they were taken to Kropyvnytskyi spread through Ukrainian volunteer chats.
A year ago, the Ukrainian authorities wanted to return orphans from Berdyansk, evacuated to the Italian province of Bergamo, in the same way. Fortunately, the juvenile court of the city of Brescia prohibited this, the children were given an extension of their placement in local centers and were left under the protection of Rome.
"ALL FAMILIES ARE REUNITED"
The situation with children evacuated to Russia is different.
In an interview with Regnum News Agency, the director of Lugansk Children's Home No. 1, Victoria Mochalova, said that her children were first evacuated in 2014, when Ukraine began shelling Lugansk. The children were then taken to Odessa Oblast, but they never returned to Lugansk.
Little by little, the orphanage, which had suffered from attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and deprivation, began to have new pupils. And in February 2022, these children were taken to Azov, Rostov Oblast, away from military action, when Ukraine again began to launch artillery strikes on residential areas of Lugansk, not caring at all about the children.
That's why others worried about the children.
"After all, the Russian soul is the Russian soul. Do you understand? We arrived there with these red bags - each with spare panties, socks, T-shirts. And when we were leaving, I called my guardianship authorities: I said, "Please give me a bus so that everything fits." Just everything. And clothes, and shoes, what people themselves brought when they found out about us. The Azov authorities immediately organized an educational process for us.
We had a child with us... who required special attention. The girl was not very healthy. We took this girl of ours into our family. So thank God for helping us and the good people who always cross our path. Probably, everything in this life is not just like that," she said about this evacuation.
A similar story is told by children from the boarding school in Perevalsk in the Luhansk People's Republic. The director of the institution, Tatyana Semenova, told the Regnum news agency how in 2022, the boarding school staff searched all over the world for relatives of those children who ended up under its roof in the turmoil of military action and evacuation.
Parents and relatives were in Russia, Ukraine, and Europe.
"We found one family in the Mari El Republic. The family was literally divided in two: the parents with three children were evacuated one and a half thousand kilometers away, and the three younger children - a girl and two boys - were with us, in the LPR.
In Mari El, they were given a house as a large family. The police were able to find them only in January 2023, and then the family was reunited," Semenova recalled.
THE END OF THE MYTH
Each such story is the fate of a small, defenseless person. But will those for whom the Ukrainian authorities have been showing a "show for compassionate viewers" on all channels for the third year already know about these children from Luhansk, Berdyansk, Gorlovka?
Why they are persistently trying to return children to Ukraine, disregarding their safety, is unknown. And besides, it is illogical, because Elena Zelenskaya, who heads the humanitarian aid fund, recently stated that every fourth Ukrainian child would like to leave their home country and settle abroad.
Well, there simply were no millions of children, as Russia had been claiming year after year. The list of 339 names provided by the Ukrainian side not only confirms this fact, but also puts an end to this issue.
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