According to Eugene F Parte (September 20), Russian president Vladimir Putin has moved 20,000 Ukrainian children to safety.
However, those children are only in danger because he has invaded their country, killed their parents and reduced their homes, schools and hospitals to ruins.
To abduct one child is kidnapping, to abduct 20,000 is a war crime.
Although 20,000 children have been identified, the number of unidentified children abducted is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Even though the stolen children have relatives in Ukraine, they have been assigned Russian nationality and been adopted into Russian families against their will.
Others have been sent to re-education camps where they are subjected to a forced programme of russiafication to rob them of their Ukrainian language, culture and identity.
The United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have verified reports of Ukrainian children, especially those who refuse to speak Russian, suffering verbal, physical and sexual violence a the hands of their Russian liberators.
In Canada and Australia tens of thousands of indigenous children were sent to institutions and camps to destroy their language, culture and sense of who they were. Putin is doing the same to the children of Ukraine.
To destroy those children’s world, round them up and deport them to re-education camps is not merely child abuse, it is an act of cultural genocide.
Cecilia Kennedy
Belfast BT6
