Russia accused of kidnapping Ukrainian children
The US embassy in Kyiv has accused the Kremlin of “illegally removing” more than 2,000 Ukrainian children from the Russian-controlled territories of Luhansk and Donetsk and taking them forcibly to Russia.
“This is not assistance. It is kidnapping,” it declared. Ukraine’s foreign ministry and Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, gave an even higher figure of 2,389 children being taken.
This isn’t the first time this week that the Kremlin has faced accusations of kidnapping. According to Inna Sovsun, a Ukrainian MP, Russian troops are forcing civilians from Mariupol to relocate to “distant parts of Russia” to work in conditions akin to slave labour.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, has told Ukrainian TV that people are being processed first in “filtration camps” where Russian forces examine their phones and documents. Those deported are being taken to Taganrog, a Russian city around 60 miles from Mariupol, before being sent by rail to “economically depressive Russian cities”.
From there, Sovsun claims: “They are being forced to sign papers saying they will stay in that area for two or three years and they will work for free in those areas.”
The kidnapping claims are being met with universal condemnation. On Monday, Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, said she was “appalled” by accounts of the “abduction and deportation” of Ukrainians emerging from the besieged port city of Mariupol.
Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol’s mayor, has accused Vladimir Putin of following the crimes of Nazi Germany, adding: “What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II.”
Reports about the abduction of thousands of Mariupol’s citizens have not been independently verified. But Pyotr Andryuschenko, an assistant to the mayor of Mariupol, estimates that “between 4,000 and 4,500” of the city’s residents have already been taken “forcibly across the border to Taganrog.” He said a number of citizens who were sheltering in a large sports complex have also been taken without their passports.
Anecdotal reports from on the ground are beginning to surface. Eduard Zarubin, a Ukrainian doctor who recently fled the city, told the New York Times that he has been in contact with other Mariupol residents who have been relocated against their will. “Now the Russians are walking through the basements, and if there are people left there, they forcibly take them to Taganrog,” he added.
Similarly, Anna Romanenko, a Ukrainian journalist, told the FT that Russian forces took her friend in Mariupol then “interrogated him, took away his Ukrainian passport and sent him to Rostov, across the border in Russia”. She has not heard from him since.
Needless to say, the narrative surroundings these deportations appearing in Russia is markedly different.
Russian state broadcasts have shown clips of passengers from the devastated city of Mariupol stepping off a train in the Russian city of Yaroslavl, north of Moscow, and thanking Russian forces for their liberation. In one example, the TV showed a trainload of more than 480 Ukrainians who have been allegedly “rescued.”
Ironically, the huge role being played by social media in this war – and the opportunity for the manipulation of news – makes it even harder to establish the truth. Never has the saying, the first casualty of war is truth, been more relevant.