This doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention, given what we know from history of war. Institute for Study of War (ISW) is a legit source, and they’re not mincing words here.
[Videos claim that] Russian officials have evacuated over 150,000 children from Donbas in 2022 alone. It is unclear exactly how Russian sources are calculating this figure, and Ukrainian officials previously estimated this number to be 6,000 to 8,000.
[…]
Forced adoption programs and the deportation of children under the guise of vacation and rehabilitation schemes likely form the backbone of a massive Russian depopulation campaign that may amount to a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and constitute a wider ethnic cleansing effort, as ISW has previously reported.
Russian invasion objectives seem clearly to center on genocide, intentional destruction of Ukrainian identity.
An ISW report that is two months old already should have raised more mainstream alarm. I mention it here for war crimes investigators in context of Microsoft reporting around the same time that it will continue working with Russian “schools”, which could in fact mean ethnic cleansing (including turning the children into waves of infantry suicide missions against their own families, as witnessed in Mozambique).
When you read far more generic statements about Russian aggression in the coming months, such as trying to mobilize 700,000 soldiers to achieve something, now you know.
In a report published last November, Amnesty International said: “Russian authorities forcibly transferred and deported civilians from occupied areas of Ukraine in what amounted to war crimes and likely crimes against humanity”.
In December 2022, the French association Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre (“For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours”), asked the International Criminal Court to examine allegations of “genocide” amid the deportation of Ukrainian children.
Moscow has made no attempt to conceal its policy of child deportation. Removing Ukrainian children from occupied territories is part and parcel of the Kremlin’s propaganda, and in keeping with the “de-Ukrainisation” called for by Putin, who passed a law in May 2022 that made it easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children. It also made it harder for Ukrainian families to reclaim their kidnapped children.
Russia is basically repeating a Nazi German strategy in WWII of turning children into cannon fodder. I’m just waiting now for confirmation that the new “re-education” centers used in these war crimes all run on Microsoft.