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I'm no Russia apologist but this seems like maximally uncharitable framing, and I'm extremely skeptical of that wiki article since it seems like blue tribe has thrown in completely with Zelensky. Having never heard of that, I assumed that Russians were literally driving around in vans and snagging kids to send them back to the motherland to process into Soylent Green or something since I can't imagine why they would bother rounding up kids in a war zone. But apparently they're just collecting war orphans, kids who were stuck in government institutions, and kids who were orphans before the war broke out, and trying to place them in Russian homes.
I'm not really sure what the alternative is. Send them across a chaotic active military front? Leave them to scrounge for rats to eat in bombed out apartment blocks? Having read the AP news article cited in the wiki (NYT one is paywalled), the biggest complaints are that the kids aren't being sent to the other side of Ukraine (which makes sense since as far as Russia is concerned eastern Ukraine is part of Russia now) and that the kids are being taught Russian which apparently counts as "genocide." From the kids' perspectives, western Ukraine and Russia are probably both very foreign, and wherever they get sent in Russia will almost certainly be farther away from the warzone then wherever they'd end up in Ukraine.
This is as bad as "kids in cages," and it makes it really hard for me to take seriously any claims of Russian war crimes (of which I'm sure there are many real examples) since western media is so eager to exaggerate to push an image of Russians as sadistic child-stealing orcs.
The kids in this article are not orphans: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65641304
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The point I'm trying to make is less about whether Russia is committing war crimes or not and more about those kids being removed from the Ukrainian population, sharpening the demographic crisis.
Ukraine needs kids if it is to continue to exist as a nation, and this war is blowing a hole in their already-sinking birthrate.
I accept that point and agree with you. Regardless of whether or not it's actual "kidnapping," it is is surely very bad for the future of an independent Ukrainian nation.
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And many of those kids have relatives in Russia who are an obvious choice for adoptive parents. I agree that bullshit like this rings glaring alarm bells when I am reading other Western reporting about the war.
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