Other View: Sending Ukrainian kids to ‘re-education camps’ just the latest war crime – Duluth News Tribune

One of Vladimir Putin’s strategies during his brutal, illegal war in Ukraine was to ensure that Russians only hear one version of reality. Be.

This week, the world learned that he also uses these tactics on Ukrainian children.

The Russian government has placed thousands of Ukrainian children in what the Kremlin has dubbed “recreation camps” but are in fact re-educational institutions aimed at engaging the children in Russian culture, history and society with a pro-Moscow lens , according to a report by Yale University and the Conflict Observatory, a program created by the State Department to document war crimes committed by Russian forces and their proxies in Ukraine.

The children are between 4 months and 17 years old. Some boys have received military training, including instructions on how to drive trucks and use firearms. Russia began sending Ukrainian children to the camps in February 2022, and as of January, relocation of children to the facilities was still taking place, the report said.

Putin was already vulnerable to a number of war crimes charges. In the Ukrainian city of Bucha, Ukrainian officials and witnesses found evidence that Russian troops executed dozens of plainclothes men, some with their hands tied behind their backs and gunshot wounds to the head. In the southern city of Mariupol, Russian forces targeted and destroyed a maternity hospital.

However, this latest inhumane act is uniquely heinous. Putin turns children into fodder for his own political ambitions.

Although the report documents that at least 6,000 children were sent to camps, the authors estimate the number could be much higher. The locations of the camps stretch from Crimea, the Ukrainian province illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, to southern Russia and Siberia, including the Magadan province in the Far East. That means Ukrainian children held in Magadan camp are at least 3,900 miles from their parents and relatives in Ukraine, as far away as London is from Chicago.

According to the report, Russia’s actions could violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a legally binding international covenant on the treatment of children. Taking in Ukrainian children for permanent resettlement in Russia, whether through adoption or foster care, could constitute a war crime.

Even with children returned to their parents, Putin has achieved his goal of inculcating a Russified way of thinking in them. The report quoted a Russian official as saying: “All camps … aim at the patriotic education of youth, the development of communication skills and the preservation of cultural heritage.” Russian patriotism, Russian education, Russian cultural heritage.

Filling children’s heads with self-serving propaganda is anything but a new tactic for Putin. In the 2000s, Russian teenagers co-opted into Putin’s political youth movement known as “Ours” met every summer at a camp on Lake Seliger outside Moscow for two weeks of athletic and ideological indoctrination. The goal of “Ours” was clear: to create the next generation of Putin-friendly Russians.

Putin’s exploitation of Ukrainian children is, of course, different because it’s about creating a new generation that stems from the Russian leader’s perverted belief that Ukraine shouldn’t exist, that it has always belonged and always will belong to Russia.

Putin could claim that he is saving these children by removing them from the theater of war. But that is obviously wrong – he has put the children of Ukraine in danger by illegally invading their sovereign nation. He certainly wasn’t thinking about children when he bombed the Mariupol maternity hospital or when Russian artillery shells rained down on hundreds of Ukrainian schools.

We don’t expect Putin to suddenly realize the unsustainable depravity of his re-education camps. However, we expect the international community to hold the former KGB agent accountable when the time is right.

For now, the US and NATO must focus on helping Ukraine win the war and retain its sovereignty. At some point, however, the moment will come when the international community must assess the magnitude and impact of this man’s war crimes.