this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
133 points (99.3% liked)

news

24347 readers
693 users here now

Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.

Rules:

-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --

-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --

-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --

-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --

-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--

-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--

-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --

-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What "kidnapping children"? Russia asked Ukraine to provide a list of names of the alleged "kidnapped" children, of which Ukraine and its western backers claim there are thousands if not tens of thousands, and they have failed to provide anything close to that.

Yes there are Russian speaking children from the affected areas who have lost their parents as a result of the war. Very often due to Ukraine's terrorist tactics such as shelling civilian areas under Russian control, systematically using Russian speaking civilians as human shields against their will (this is amply attested by thousands of witness testimonies from the people in the liberated cities), kidnapping men off the streets, or just plain executing Russian speaking civilians who the Ukrainian Nazi brigades view as traitors for choosing to wait for the Russians. And undoubtedly in a war zone you will also have incidents of children simply becoming separated from their parents in the chaos.

But Russia has a humanitarian obligation to protect civilians, especially children, by removing them from active combat zones, and if they are children giving them stable housing and education until the parents or other relatives who are still alive come to claim them. And many of these children's families are already in Russia or Russian controlled territory already so it's usually not a problem. There have been several stories in Russian media about children being reunited with their parents, even with parents travelling from Ukraine to Russia to look for them, and the families usually choose to stay in Russia afterwards since it is much safer.

What Russia is not going to do is release potentially orphaned children to the Nazi regime in Kiev, when Ukraine is notoriously Europe's human trafficking capital, without solid guarantees that these children will actually go to their parents and not end up in a trafficking situation. There are too many horrific stories from Ukrainians themselves about children just disappearing in their corrupt systems. There was even a report about children who Ukraine claimed Russia had "kidnapped" somehow turning up in Germany. I'm sorry but protecting those children is more important than giving in to the Kiev regime's hysterics just to score PR points with the West.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I appreciate the response. Do you have any sources you can direct me to for the claims you made about what's going on?

I tried to make it clear in my original comment that getting kids out of a war zone, even if NAFO hysteria was completely true and they were put in Russification residential schools and deliberately kept from their parents (which I don't necessarily believe, I'm just using this as an example), would still be much better than leaving them in the war zone, even if it would merit severe criticism.

But it sounds like NAFO dorks are tabulating "kidnapped children" using roughly the same methodology as their tabulation of holodomor deaths, i.e. using an extremely flimsy interpretation of statistics to invent ridiculous accusations centered on victims who they don't seem to have any specific idea about the existence of.

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

This is probably the most thorough debunking of the entire thing i've read so far.

Some other articles on the topic:

"Accusations of child “kidnapping” by Russia have proven to be lies. Ukrainian children found in Germany"

"The Fake ‘Kidnapping’ Probe: How the West Covered for Ukraine’s Child Trafficking Networks"

Here an article from a Donbass publication on trafficking networks in Ukraine. And here is an investigative piece implicating the Zelensky regime.

And there is more in Russian language media if you know how to look for it. Most browsers have a translation feature so the language barrier is generally not a big problem nowadays. Here are some examples:

"339 evacuees. Ukrainian show about «stolen children» failed"

The machine translation i got is a bit odd in places but it's good enough:

When the Ukrainian side eventually handed over the list of those same «stolen children», it contained only 339 names — not thousands and, of course, not millions, as they have been claiming in Kiev all these years.

But no one kidnapped these children either. They were evacuated and rescued by Russian soldiers. Every child whose legal representative was found returns to his family, Medinsky emphasized.

«From a similar list, children recently ended up in Germany, but claims were made by the Russian Federation. This shameful PR campaign must stop. All families will reunite, it's a matter of honor», — he added.

Those same children — 161 children from Ukraine were found evacuated to Germany a year ago, which was confirmed by the head of the National Police of Ukraine Ivan Vygovsky. At the same time, for two years in a row, all world media wrote about «kidnapped», in the mildest wording — «children forcibly deported» to Russia and Belarus.

[...]

The Ukrainian authorities and propagandists tried to present the evacuation of children from the combat zone as an act of «genocide». There were even theses that these children, temporarily staying with their families in sanatoriums and boarding houses on the Black Sea, would lose «their Ukrainian cultural identity».

In reality, the process of family reunification did not stop throughout the entire period of the SVO. The children met with their relatives through the mediation of Qatar, Belarus and other countries, as regularly reported by the Ombudsman's Office. Moreover, the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets — too.

[...]

If Kiev is worried about their safety, the Ukrainian authorities should be happy when children are away from hostilities and evacuated. However, no. Ukrainian and European volunteer communities were shocked by the news this week: children with disabilities who were evacuated back in 2022 were returned to Ukraine from Austria.

[...]

Austrian social services were shocked by this decision. Until now, the children lived safely in the special SeneCura institution in Burgauberg-Neudauberg under the supervision of Ukrainian specialists.

Former Secretary of State of the Austrian People's Party Christine Marek she wrote an open letter to the Ukrainian ambassador, calling «’s decision absolutely incomprehensible» and threatening the well-being of children. A representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Vienna also expressed concern Christoph Pinter.

But neither this nor dozens of indignant articles in the Austrian media helped. On June 1, the children were taken away, and stories spread through Ukrainian volunteer chats about how carelessly, without complying with any medical requirements, they were taken to Kropyvnytskyi.

A year ago, the Ukrainian authorities wanted in the same way to return orphans from Berdyansk who had been evacuated to the Italian province of Bergamo. Fortunately, the juvenile court of the city of Brescia prohibited this, the children were extended their placement in local centers and left under the protection of Rome

"«They were saved by a Russian soldier». How children from the combat zone were returned to their families"

"Ukraine has turned into a "black market" for child trafficking to the West"