One of the most heartbreaking crimes of this century – of any century – is the enforced relocation of at least 20,000 Ukrainian children into Russia.
It’s atrocious that children become the most helpless victims of wars through their hideous sufferings and death, and in this case, becoming young “prisoners of war.”
That cruel crime has been happening ever since Vladimir Putin ordered an attack/invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
Now, kudos to U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) for reminding all of us to be horrified by that crime against children and for trying to do something about it. Those senators are working together with others to bring a bipartisan-backed bill for the Senate’s consideration. It’s called the “Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act.”
This legislation would support Ukraine’s efforts to investigate and track the Ukrainian children who have been abducted during Russia’s invasion. The bill would assist with the rehabilitation and reintegration of children who are returned and seek accountability for perpetrators of these abductions.
Any potential peace agreement with Russia would require a binding condition – that those children, who have become pawns of war, are released back to their own loved ones in Ukraine.
According to the U.S. State Department, Russia forces some of the older abducted children to become soldiers. Many are forcefully adopted by Russian families or placed in “camps” to “Russiafy” them, which means a relentless “brainwashing” effort to erase from those children’s minds their own language, their own culture, their own heritage.
It’s the same heartbreaking treatment perpetrated against Native American children in the United States and Canada. So many of those children were forcibly placed in “boarding schools” in which they lived far from their parents and families, as “authorities” (teachers) tried to squelch their identities, language, culture and family ties. Imagine the aching loneliness of those abused kids (and their parents) as they endured the agonies of those broken bonds. It’s a shameful chapter in American history that continued into the first decades of the 20th Century.
The Ukrainian children include those who were separated from parents during bombings or other attacks, leaving them alone and vulnerable, often because their parents had been killed. In other cases, the children were taken by the invading Russians from orphanages or hospitals.
Thankfully, about 1,500 of those abducted children have been located and returned. Some of them said they experienced severe abuse, cruel punishments and other forms of restraint.
Adoptions by Russian families make it very difficult to track, find and return the children home again, free from that alien environment in which they must struggle to live.
As historians noted about the forced “re-education” of Native American children, the trauma of separation and resultant emotional scars lasted a lifetime for them and their loved ones.
“The mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russia is an atrocity,” Sen. Klobuchar said. “We cannot accept a world where children are abducted during wartime and used as a form of hostage-taking for negotiations. Our bipartisan legislation will provide the necessary resources to bring them home and hold the perpetrators accountable.”
Sen. Grassley had this to say:
“These children should be returned home as soon as possible. Our bipartisan legislation supports critical tools to identify and track the location of these children and reintegrate them into their homeland. We’re also helping hold perpetrators accountable for their atrocities to ensure justice is served.”
Amen!
In this weary world so often rocked by savage violence and constant instabilities, it’s all too easy to lose sight of these youngest victims of war. Those children, all of them innocent victims of that vicious Russian invasion, must be allowed to return to their county, to their own homes, before further harms befall them.
Write, call, meet with or email your legislators and urge them to support the Klobuchar-Grassley “Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act.”
