The kidnappings, transfers to Russia and forced adoptions are part of a genocidal project designed by Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. It aims to destroy their future.
In the war of terror unleashed by Vladimir Putin, the mass deportations of Ukrainian children and their forced adoption reveal a global enterprise to eradicate the future of Ukraine. It is not a territorial conflict which subsequently changed its nature, but the execution of a plan to annihilate the Ukrainian nation, combining destruction, massacres, Russification and forced population transfers.
This genocidal project was conceived by Vladimir Putin and his inner circle well before February 24, 2022. From the first days of the invasion, the kidnappings of minors residing in institutions in occupied Donbass were systematic.
On March 9, 2022, their organizer, the Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, approached Vladimir Putin, her “direct superior” , in his own words, to resolve an unfortunate legal obstacle: the Ukrainian nationality of the children, under Russian law, prohibited their adoption. A few weeks later, Vladimir Putin had the Duma adopt a decree facilitating the granting of Russian nationality to Ukrainian children.
The interview between Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, published on the Kremlin website, and the decrees which followed it attest, before international justice, to the intention and the role of the leadership of the Russian Federation in organizing the largest operation of kidnappings and forced adoptions since the end of the Second World War.
Judge those responsible
With the help of the army, in the occupied territories, boarding schools, nurseries and orphanages were emptied; the families who had been offered to send their children to “holiday camps” in Crimea did not see them return; other minors were separated from their parents during their forced “evacuation” to Russia and their passage through “filtration” camps.
Since then, around forty centers have been opened in Russia to “re-educate” young Ukrainians rebelling against Russification, and eradicate their intimate attachment to Ukrainian identity.
From the Kremlin to Donbass, to Siberia, the pyramid of regional governors, civil servants, those responsible for child welfare, supported by the military hierarchy, involves several hundred people. The evidence is there, documented by NGOs, available in official texts, television broadcasts or Russian social media accounts. They were the subject, on December 21, 2022, of a report by the association For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours to the International Criminal Court (ICC) which, with the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, has the jurisdiction to investigate these crimes and try those responsible. The genocidal classification of these deportations is beyond doubt with regard to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, as well as the Rome Statute which, in 2002, founded the ICC.
But the forced transfer of tens or hundreds of thousands of children cannot be separated from crimes against humanity and the practice of terror by the Russian army. After the bombings razed homes, the Russian security forces moved into the city, equipped with an inventory of goods to steal from museums, factories, houses, but also lists of people to arrest: political leaders, civil servants. , etc.
As for the forced Russification of the entire population (new passport, new language, new currency, new history, etc.), it is imposed by playing on the despair of the survivors who, in the ruins of their city, are deprived of everything: water, food, electricity, communications.
Biological and psychological destruction of their future
Then the last inhabitants were forced to leave, “evacuated” by bus to Russia, with a stop in the “filtration” camps. It is the collective future that is obliterated and the common past erased, when history books are burned, as in the past in Grozny [capital of Chechnya] and, since 2014, in occupied Crimea . In destroyed Mariupol, facade reconstructions welcome new Russian families, who have come, willingly or not, to replace the original population.
We cannot separate this policy of “ethnic cleansing” from all war crimes or crimes against humanity. First of all, in defiance of the Geneva Convention, it is the killing of prisoners of war, such as in Olenivka, July 29, 2022, where 53 fighters from Azovstal were massacred. There are also dozens of torture chambers, hundreds of anonymous graves or mass graves where prisoners of war and civilians were hastily buried, as in Izioum and Boutcha. And these are the countless rapes perpetrated against women and children, girls and boys, even babies.
These crimes are too numerous and geographically widespread to be the work of isolated soldiers, left to their own devices. They are part of a deliberate policy of biological and psychological destruction, intended to dehumanize the victims and terrorize the population.
Russia's policy of terror against the “small peoples” it intends to dominate has a long history. The Holodomor hunger genocide, orchestrated by Stalin in 1932 and 1933, caused the deaths of more than four million Ukrainians and was followed by mass deportations of children. This unpunished crime resonates in the current destruction of vital water and electricity supply facilities and in the systematic looting of crops.
Similarly, the persecution suffered by the Crimean Tatars since 2014 repeats their deportation by Stalin. The crimes committed against Ukraine were experienced in Chechnya and Syria, with everyone’s knowledge. Western governments turned a blind eye, industrialists and banks concluded deals with Russia, as if nothing had happened.
Disavow cowardice
Today it is important to disavow the cowardice which has led to bargaining for the freedom of peoples. We owe it to our values to declare that Russia is clearly a terrorist state, which has banned itself from nations.
As desired the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Oleksandra Matviichuk , « we must make the criminals face their responsibilities and bring justice for all the crimes of this war (…) [It is necessary]that the human rights become the basis of political decisions. »
The opening, by the ICC, of an investigation into the deportations of children and the broadcast , on March 17, of two arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, mark a turning point that European public opinion is demanding. Nearly a million citizens from across Europe have signed two converging petitions calling on European heads of state and government to solemnly intervene to save Ukrainian children.
French President Emmanuel Macron on the occasion of the European Council on March 23 and 24 and the Council of Europe on May 16 and 17 in Reykjavik [Iceland], must make the deportation of children a “red line”, on the same level as respect for Ukraine's borders: no prospect of peace can emerge without the return of all children deported and the punishment of all crimes, including, when proven by the ICC, that of genocide, of which Vladimir Putin is the architect.
¶ Emmanuel Daoud, lawyer at the Paris bar and at the ICC; Jonathan Littell, writer and filmmaker; Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, anthropologist; Pierre Raiman, secretary of the association For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours! ; Gabriel Sebbah, lawyer at the Paris bar; Nicolas Tenzer, analyst of international and security issues, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.