The children Russia kidnapped (The Atlantic)

First they were spirited off to camps, or evacuated from cities under siege. Then they were made into Russians without history or provenance.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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Forcibly removed from Ukraine, used as leverage, “reeducated,” and “Russified,” the children at the center of Russia’s agitprop are the potential victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

You may have read that Russia is stealing Ukraine’s children. But what you haven’t read before is an aspect I reported on for The Atlantic magazine, in a story out today. Not only are the Russians spiriting children across the border and forcing them to speak their language, they are erasing the tracks that would one day help reunite the kids with their Ukrainian families. The Russians are changing their names, adopting them out and preventing their promised return home — and, in the process, they’re obfuscating the fact that the children ever came from Ukraine.

From the article:

Amid the bombast of Russia’s one-year celebration of its war in Ukraine, a 15-year-old with thick, black hair and a gray hooded jacket was handed a microphone. In front of thousands of cheering people, Anya Naumenko thanked “Uncle Yuri”—a Russian soldier known as Yuri Gagarin—for saving her, her sister, and “hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol,” the Ukrainian city that fell under heavy attack from the first day of Russia’s cross-border invasion, in February 2022.

Having recited words she’d clearly been told to memorize, Anya sheepishly turned to the adults next to her and said, “I forgot a little.”

“Anya,” said a woman in a stop-sign-red coat, quickly covering for the slipup, “don’t be shy! Go hug Uncle Yuri!”

Anya gave the soldier a one-armed side hug as the woman said to a handful of younger children onstage: “Everyone give a hug. Look! It’s the man who saved you all!”

Aired on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the video was followed by an interview with Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.

“It’s absolutely stomach-churning,” Raymond told the CNN host. “That, for me, Anderson, that’s a hostage video.”

Forcibly removed from Ukraine, used as leverage, “reeducated,” and “Russified,” the children at the center of Russia’s agitprop are the potential victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are, Raymond told me in a recent interview, “pawns in a hostile situation,” and Russia’s treatment of them, far from that of a kind savior, violates the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, among other instruments of international humanitarian law.

To read the rest of the story, please click over to The Atlantic.

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