Alex Constantine - May 29, 2022
"U.N. told 'credible' claims of sexual violence against children as Russia's war drives a third of Ukrainians from their homes" -CBS News, May 13, 2022
... The war's effect on Ukraine's youth has been particularly devastating, and Britain's U.N. ambassador said that appeared to extend to sexual violence committed against children by the invading forces. ... "There are credible allegations of sexual violence against children by Russian forces," Woodward added. "As others have said, mass displacement has left children exposed to human trafficking and sexual exploitation." Last month, Ukrainian lawmaker Kira Rudyk told CBS News that sexual violence was being used systematically "in all the areas that were occupied by the Russians."
"Rape is used as a tool of war in Ukraine to break our spirits, to humiliate us and to show us that we can be helpless to protect our women and children and their bodies," Kira Rudyk, a member of Ukraine's Parliament, told CBS News. "It is happening systematically in the occupied territories."
At the Security Council on Thursday, U.N. children's agency (UNICEF) Deputy Executive Director Omar said "children and parents tell us of their 'living hell,' where they were forced to go hungry, drink from muddy puddles, and shelter from constant shelling and bombardments, dodging bombs, bullets and landmines as they fled."
He called the war "a child protection and child rights crisis."
"Children in Ukraine have been displaced, hurt, orphaned, or killed," U.S. Deputy U.N. Ambassador Richard Mills told diplomats. "Of the nearly 14 million people forced to flee their homes since the conflict escalated, approximately half are innocent children; children who deserve a chance to live, grow, and thrive, but instead, are struggling every day to survive in horrific circumstances."
"Russia Is Not ‘Protecting’ Ukraine’s Children of War" -- The Telegraph, May 16, 2022
... Dislocation has put the health of these children at risk just as the World Health Organization accused Russia of bombarding scores of hospitals and health care facilities across Ukraine. ...
On May 8, UNICEF’s executive director, Catherine Russell, denounced an attack on a school in Bilohorivka in eastern Ukraine. Locals were sheltering in the facility’s bunker, she said.
“We do not yet know how many children might have been killed or injured in the reported bombing, but we fear this attack has just added to the hundreds of children who have already lost their lives in this war,” Russell said.
Reuters reported that as many as 60 people may have died in that strike. A few weeks later, on March 20, Ukraine authorities said Russia bombed an art school in Mariupol where an estimated 400 people – women, children, the elderly – were sheltering.
Nebenzia, the U.N. official, stated that 190,000 Ukrainian children had been transported to Russia. The state-owned news agency TASS reported in April that the country’s education ministry was making arrangements for Russian families to receive Ukrainian orphans.
Lilia Gumerova, education committee chair in Russia’s senate, said last month she was appalled that Ukrainian children brought from the “liberated territories in Ukraine” did not speak Russian. She promised they would attend summer school to learn Russian and “liberate their tongues.”
Ukrainian authorities maintain that Ukrainian children are being forcibly deported to Russia in violation of international law.
On May 13, Ukraine’s human rights ombudswoman, Lyudmyla Denisova, accused Russia of taking more than 210,000 Ukrainian children and trying to make them Russian citizens, Reuters reported. The news agency said it “could not independently verify the figure given by Denisova or her allegations, for which she did not provide supporting evidence.”
At a news briefing the same day, Daria Herasymchuk, adviser to Ukraine’s president on children’s rights, also accused Russia of forcefully deporting Ukrainian children to Russia. ...
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a sister U.S. news agency to Voice of America and Polygraph.info, reported on the alleged rape and pregnancy of a 14-year-old girl from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. ...
Ombudswoman Denisova said her office had during the first two weeks of April received 400 reports of rape by Russian troops.
"Russia’s reported abduction of Ukrainian children echoes other genocidal policies, including US history of kidnapping Native American children" -- The Conversation, May 16, 2022
... In the U.S., the government conducted child abductions to quell the military resistance of America’s Indigenous peoples and prevent future opposition.
The Nazi practice of kidnapping “racially desirable children” from conquered countries and raising them as Germans has been well documented. And the communists’ abduction during the 1940s of nearly 28,000 Greek children to communist countries was also well known. The Greek delegation to the United Nations successfully pushed for the inclusion of child transfers within the legal definition of genocide specifically because of these abductions.
Child abductions are considered so heinous that the very first genocide convictions were of 14 Nazi officials charged with forcibly transferring Polish children to Germany. At trial, prosecutor Harold Neely suggested child abduction might even be the most outrageous of all the Nazis’ crimes. Neely said the world knew about mass killings and atrocities by Nazis, but he added, “the crime of kidnapping children, in many respects, transcends them all.”
In signing on to the genocide convention – an international treaty that criminalizes genocide – in 1948, the U.S. agreed that forcible child transfers constitute genocide. Yet it continued its own practice of Native child abductions for another 30 years."
