The forced movement of minors in Russia is part of Vladimir Putin's project “to eradicate the Ukrainian identity and nation”, affirms, in an article in “Le Monde”, a collective intellectuals and child psychiatrists, including Bernard Golse and the anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe.
In its nostalgia for a vassalized Central Europe where any dissent was crushed by sending tanks to Budapest or Prague, the Kremlin has been ravaging Ukraine for five months under the cover of “denazification” and negation of the Ukrainian nation, using a strategy of terror which razes cities, massacres and rapes civilians, displaces populations.
Between February 24 and June 18, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, more than 1.9 million Ukrainians, including more than 307,000 children [ 200,000 according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the beginning of June], would have been forcibly transferred to the Russian Federation, without guarantee or external controls on their living conditions and their future.
This transfer via one-way evacuation corridors, to “filtration camps”, then to places as remote as Murmansk, Kamchatka or the North Korean border, brings back the specter of deportations perpetrated by Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union.
Our deepest concerns relate to the fate of deported children, particularly the most vulnerable: minors isolated or placed in institutions , orphans or not. More than 2,000 of them were registered in Ukrainian reception establishments before the invasion.
To this figure is added an unknown number of children recently orphaned by the Russian invasion and others who were separated from their parents during their passage in “filtration camps”, where the latter were held, suspected of belonging to the army or the Ukrainian resistance. As investigators appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council fear, these minors all risk being adopted by Russian families: on July 20, 108 of them, originally from the Donetsk region, have already been according to Ukrainian rights defender, Dmytro Lubinets.
Indeed, Russia has not ratified the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in terms of international adoption, the only transnational legal framework allowing international adoption procedures. The decrees, signed by Vladimir Putin on May 25 and July 11, simplifying the obtaining of Russian nationality for Ukrainians – including for children – even facilitate their adoption. This text is accompanied by a law, passed on June 7, which authorizes the Russian Federation to no longer apply the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.
In fact, the Russian Federation does not feel constrained in any way to respect international humanitarian law, the framework of which it rejects . Also, the requests addressed to the Kremlin by the Ukrainian authorities demanding the return of the young deportees depend entirely on the goodwill of the invader, who only satisfies them in dribs and drabs: only twenty-three returned to Ukraine in June, and forty-four at the beginning of July, according to Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchouk.
Plan to eradicate the Ukrainian nation
What about everyone else? Some“are undergoing rehabilitation”, said , on May 31, Maria Lvova Belova, the Commissioner for Children's Rights under the President of the Russian Federation, recently sanctioned by the United Kingdom for her role in the transfer and forced adoption of Ukrainian children. The “re-education” of children is, in fact, part of the plan to eradicate the Ukrainian nation published in April by the ideologue Timofeï Sergeitsev, close to Vladimir Putin, a plan accompanied by comments denying Ukrainian identity made daily in the Russian media.
If international humanitarian law places first priority, in the case of an armed conflict, respect for integrity of children is that they are always hostages of the adult world in issues that go beyond them and, in particular, the privileged target of “purification-assimilation” practices.
« European governments and all democracies
must intervene unanimously demanding from Russia
the release of the children and all the deportees”
The trafficking of minors, through illegal adoption procedures, was systematically organized in Franco's Spain or under the Argentine dictatorship. During the Second World War, between 50,000 and 200,000 of them, kidnapped in Poland or other occupied countries, were “adopted” by “Aryan” families, at the instigation of the Nazi regime. The mass kidnapping of children, in an armed conflict, and their exploitation as objects at our disposal, according to autocratic “laws”, lead to the radical destruction of their past, of their psychological foundations. A destruction, which can be described as a murder of the soul, which will forever mark their destiny.
How can we impose respect for the founding rights of humanity on an invader who only respects force? Democracies, in fact, have difficulty understanding to what extent extreme cruelty against civilians of all ages is valued and legitimated, in the culture of the Kremlin and the KGB – if not in Russian culture in general. and sexes. When it concerns children, whose vulnerability makes the duty of protection of adults obligatory and sacred, international authorities fail to imagine the possible and probable fate of the children deported from Ukraine.
The political morality of the current Russian power is, in fact, marked by the union of two traditions of predation and violence : that which is current in organized crime and that which governs relations within the KGB, now FSB. They have the same conviction in common: considering that the worst means are legitimate to achieve the ends of predation and power. Arbitrariness, manipulation, crimes and lies to cover them up are normal, even talented, performances of political action.
Hence, also, the valorization of cruelty, considered as proof of the political infallibility of those who use it and will therefore be able to climb the ladder of power and access management positions. Hence an absolute contempt for human lives and the very principle of their rights. Hence a ban on humanist sensitivity, seen as ridiculous and a sign of weakness. Thus, the entire history of Soviet totalitarianism, of which the Putinist system is in many respects the heir, is marked by a heavy tradition of deportations and massacres of civilian populations of all ages and sexes, and which have never spared the children.
This should alert outside witnesses: the current power of the Kremlin will not preserve Ukrainian children. Forced adoption channels? Indoctrination in the institutions that collect them? Criminal trafficking of all kinds? In this senseless war of aggression, the Russification program imposed in the regions of Ukraine invaded since 2014 clearly outlines the contours of the policy that Russia has begun to implement: while Ukrainians are murdered or deported, populations from Russia are established in Ukraine, sometimes by force. This is a real “demographic revolution”, based on the replacement of indigenous populations.
Extinction of a human group
It must be clear: nothing protects children from this assumed and legitimized political use of crimes against humanity as a choice deliberate tactic. Debates on the genocidal dimension of Vladimir Putin's aggression against Ukraine began as soon as the mass murders and war crimes committed by the Russian army were revealed.
But, with the deportation of the children, Russia is taking a further step. If, as Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states, the "forcible transfer of children of the group [victim] to another group » part of genocidal acts is that a genocide aims at the extinction of genos, the lineage which ensures the perpetuation, and therefore the future, of a human group.
Vladimir Putin's “special operation” is in fact an attempt to annihilate Ukraine: the negation of past of this country – its cultural traditions – and its present – its state legitimacy – continues in the project of erasing its culture and its language through the forced Russification of deported children.
The same is true in the territories occupied by the Russian army, where the eradication of Ukrainian identity reaches first the younger generations: children born after April 24 are automatically declared Russian nationals; the only language of instruction is Russian; the school curricula, purged of all references to Ukraine, are now those of the Russian Federation. In occupied southern Ukraine, children whose parents do not acquire Russian passports, or do not send their daughters and sons to Russified schools, will be removed from their families' custody.
Assign a “Russian future” , as Kremlin propaganda proclaims, to children, this is, for Vladimir Putin, amputating the future of Ukraine and upsetting that of Europe.
An obligation of protection
It is our responsibility to put an end to this destructive enterprise as quickly as possible, which flouts international laws binding every country to consider the interests of the child as of “paramount” importance, that is to say the foundation of their life and their future. The 1948 Convention is explicit in its first article: “The contracting parties confirm that genocide , whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law, which they undertake to prevent and punish. » Enunciated after the Second World War, this principle, beyond its legal value, has the value of prevention and a moral imperative.
What form should this imperative take as the eradication of Ukrainian identity continues? If it is urgent to considerably amplify sanctions, military, material and logistical support, European governments and all democracies have an obligation to protect. They must intervene unanimously and publicly by demanding from Russia the release of the children and all the deportees and calling on the international organizations concerned, including Unicef and the Red Cross, so that they act as quickly as possible.
¶ Bernard Golse, child psychiatrist; Jonathan Littell, writer and filmmaker; Pierre Lévy-Soussan, child psychiatrist; Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, anthropologist; Sylvie Rollet, collective For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!; Nicolas Tenzer, political scientist.