Russia’s reported abduction of Ukrainian children and other genocidal policies

 

Allegations have emerged recently that Ukrainian children are being forcibly removed from their country by Russia. Once there, they are put up for adoption.

 These tactics are horrific, but far from rare. There is a long history of military aggressors forcibly transferring enemy children from their home countries as a means of sowing chaos and terror and weakening resistance. 

  The Nazi practice of kidnapping “racially desirable children” from conquered countries and raising them as Germans has been well documented. And the communists’ abduction during the 1940s of nearly 28,000 Greek children to communist countries was also well known. The Greek delegation to the United Nations successfully pushed for the inclusion of child transfers within the legal definition of genocide specifically because of these abductions. 

Child abductions are considered so heinous that the very first genocide convictions were of 14 Nazi officials charged with forcibly transferring Polish children to Germany. At trial, prosecutor Harold Neely suggested child abduction might even be the most outrageous of all the Nazis’ crimes. Neely said the world knew about mass killings and atrocities by Nazis, but he added, “the crime of kidnapping children, in many respects, transcends them all.”

In signing on to the genocide convention – an international treaty that criminalizes genocide – in 1948, the U.S. agreed that forcible child transfers constitute genocide. 

If Russia is forcibly adopting Ukrainian children, then,  the trauma of these abductions may span generations.