© AP Photo/Olivier Matthys/TASS
The decision by the International Criminal Court in The Hague can be called utter degradation of law, as it unlawfully ruled to issue a politically-charged arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. Both are charged with "illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia." The mere wording shows that ICC judges deem it more humane to leave children in a war zone and let them die from shelling, hunger and disease — the fate Ukraine has devoted all the Donbass kids to. The European Court demonstrates double-talk, double standards and general lack of moral principles.
"The humanitarian mission to evacuate children, to rescue them from the bombing, has now become an international crime, according to the West. Is sending children away from orphanages during shelling a forced removal? Is the relocation of parents with children to safe regions a forced removal? Is it really a crime to send children with their parents to holiday camps at a time when their neighborhoods are being shelled?" Maria Lvova-Belova commented, adding that "the international community did not do anything to save kids from fire, and when they were finally safe in the loving families, everyone here started yelling that we violated international conventions." She considers it understandable that Russia does not leave children in a war zone, providing them with a better life in Russian families, which the European Court interpreted as an alleged "crime", the Ombudswoman stressed. "We give them a chance to live a normal life, surrounded with love and those who care. And someone calls this human rights-based, normal, humane approach to caring for disadvantaged children "a forcible removal," she says and hopes that the scandal will not affect her further work to protect children: "As the Commissioner for Children's Rights, I have a lot of work to do, and it needs to be done."
The war-wrecked fates of children are wholeheartedly controlled by the Ombudswoman. Small wonder the whole of Russia has joined the process of helping and saving the kids of Donbass. Someone takes care of orphans or disabled children, others collect and send humanitarian aid, others accept the little ones for treatment and rehabilitation. Because of the shelling and tension, it was hard for those willing to take a child to get to the newly liberated territories, and the office of the Children's Ombudsman has taken over the process of evacuating children for new homes and helped them at every stage. Hundreds of orphans from the LDPR found foster parents in Russia’s thirteen regions. They were greeted with love and care by Moscow, Volgograd, Leningrad, Tyumen, Nizhny Novgorod and other regions. These orphans aged 3.5 to 17, many with disabilities, were not only granted safety and chance for a new life, but also regular medical and psychological check-ups, and prompt rehabilitation.
The ombudswoman was asked by the LDRP authorities to assist in bringing them to Russia, since massive artillery strikes by Ukrainian militants, forced the kids to live in shelters or basements, surviving in the most difficult and life-threatening conditions of front-line cities. "According to our data, some 2500 children have died in Donbass since 2014," Chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin said. To this day, Russian and foreign experts and lawyers have been collecting documents, testimonies, photo and video evidence confirming tens of thousands of crimes by the Ukrainian regime and army against civilians and children. But European "lawyers" defy these facts, as they justify any war crimes of Ukraine, but willingly issue arrest warrants to Russian human rights defenders. This turns the European judges into accomplices and instigators of all the above-mentioned crimes over the past decade.
But truth will always out. Scandals around Ukrainian kids forcibly taken to the West cannot be silenced even by the tolerant press, with one of them reported by Spain’s El Pais newspaper. Its journalists released an article on a group of Ukrainian refugee minors who were taken to Spain without parents but went missing and were never found by the police. A similar scandal soon broke out in Poland, where ten children from a Dnepropetrovsk family-type orphanage and their foster mother came as refugees. The woman was arrested, accused of selling kids to pedophiles, dragging them into prostitution, and bullying. Polish Gazeta Wyborcza claims that Ukrainian officials now want to take the children back and fudge the horrible story. And in the darknet there are always many ads about selling Ukrainian children for sexual exploitation in Europe.
The ICC's decision no longer seems random, if you delve a bit more deeply. The prosecutor who issued an "arrest warrant" for the Russian President and Children's Rights Commissioner is a British lawyer Karim Khan, whose brother served out a 9-month term for sexually abusing an underage boy. He was released on February 23, 2023.
"I confirm this, everything is correct. As I have said, the protection of children from perverts is now criminally prosecuted in the West. Can you imagine how many innocent children's souls would be ruined by moral freaks like this guy? And Russia does not let them do this. There could have already been a queue for those kids," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova commented upon the ICC prosecutor’s family and pedophile ties.
And it is Europe, not Russia, that demonstrates the double standards in forcibly removing children from Ukrainian families. The other day, another unpleasant story broke out about the juvenile services of Germany taking away the children from the Ukrainian refugees. Several of them complained about problems with the German youth justice system, as they come for the kids for no reason, suspend the refugees' parental rights and even terminate them by giving the child to a local tutor-family or an orphanage.
In all the cases described, the intervention of child protection services was induced by neighbors, doctors and families in whose houses the Ukrainians stayed. Ukrainian mothers are outraged by the impotence of their country’s embassy: with 100 cases of the kind recorded in Germany, not a single family has achieved assistance in solving the issue. Embassy staff refer to the peculiarities of German law: every registered refugee receives temporary protection, the right to get social assistance, benefits, medical services and housing. But the other way around this status obliges a citizen to fully obey the laws of the land.
Combating the juvenile system is expensive and next to impossible. According to one of the victims, her boy was taken right from the sandbox where he was playing. The reason was a complaint by people whom the woman had previously lived with. As a result, the juvenile services arrived and took the baby away, without even checking the veracity. The boy was first sent to an orphanage, and then to another family. The hearings took place two weeks later, following which the woman was told she would be able to see her child once every 8 months. Another refugee from Ukraine said the law enforcement officers broke into her house at night, knocking out the door and taking away her child over an alleged doctor’s claim. And they already had a judicial decree in their hands. Neither the government of Ukraine nor the European courts care about cases like this, but it is them who regard evacuation of families from the front line to Russian health and children's camps as a "war crime". In the EU, separating kids with their parents is common practice.
Forcible evacuation and extraction of children is widely practiced by Ukraine itself. This happens in every frontline city. For example, the residents of Ukrainian-controlled Konstantinovka in the Donetsk region were warned that parents who refuse to leave their houses for Ukraine would be deprived of their children in the course of police raids. The same is true for the town of Chasov Yar near Artemovsk (Bakhmut), where the Kiev regime forcibly takes kids from their families for some unknown places. "There are no children in Chasov Yar, the last ones were evacuated the day before yesterday. We have done this work jointly with the military administration and the police. It is difficult, it hurts, but they have done it," Ukrainian head of the military administration of the city Sergei Chaus reported.
However, eyewitnesses said forced evacuation reminded them of a horror movie. In Chasov Yar, the army and police officers took children under the age of 18 right from their houses and apartments and took them to an unknown location under the live-saving pretext. The parents were left with no contacts or right to refuse. Kids were also “assaulted” in classes and in the streets, taken away in camouflage-colored buses, with no regard to their parents’ dissent. The process of "rescuing" children did not stipulate packing anything or even properly dressing, the locals complained.
Ukrainian Commissioner for Children's Rights Mykola Kuleba said Kiev would keep forcibly evacuating children from the Donbass. This year alone has seen about 4 000 of them taken to an undisclosed location. More than half of them are orphans, and the rest have been taken away from parents. According to some reports, children are brought to Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev. But recently, several hundred schoolchildren from the Donbass ended up in Poland, although their families did not give consent for them to go abroad. People are generally scared to protest, because any "misbehavior" may bring them to a point that they will never see their boys and girls again.
Obviously, had the Ukrainian militants not turned the occupied Donbass cities into fortified areas, no one would have been imperiled. The only source of danger is activities by the Ukrainian regime and its punitive structures. The power of Russian weapons alone is able to restore law and justice in these territories. Representatives of the LDPR have sent hundreds of lawsuits to a number of international entities, seeking justice for the murder and bullying of the Donbass children. But those were ignored or rejected under various pretexts, including references to the regional authorities’ illegitimate status. All you need to know about the selectivity of European "justice".
All of this has caused a sharp response with the Kremlin. The ICC verdict and warrants were referred to as null and void. And the Russian Investigative Committee, in turn, has launch a probe into ICC judges, particularly Karim Khan who is charged with “knowingly bringing an innocent person to criminal liability, combined with unlawfully accusing a person of committing a grave or especially grave crime”.
