Greg Fulton: Russia's insidious genocide in Ukraine

The Oxford Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

Throughout history, the world has been slow to recognize or respond to genocide, and in some cases unwilling to acknowledge that it even happened.

In 1915, the Turks deported Armenians from their homeland to the desert, where an estimated 1 million people died. Turkey still will not acknowledge that genocide occurred despite ample evidence to the contrary.

During World War II, when the Nazis were seeking the final solution in Europe through mass executions of Jews, the Allies were receiving intelligence reports about death camps but it was only after the war that they acknowledged that genocide had occurred.

More recently, genocide has occurred in plain sight in places like Rwanda and the Sudan, with the world slow to act. Today China seeks to eliminate any vestige of the Uyghurs, their religion and their native culture as they exile them to far-off work camps from which many will never return.

Last month, the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on 13 people and entities connected to the forced deportation and transfer of Ukraine’s children. This is the latest recognition that Russia is conducting an insidious form of genocide in the Ukraine. While the deportation of children does not fit the traditional view of genocide involving death camps or mass executions, for all intents and purposes, it seeks to accomplish the same goal.

Since the beginning of the war in 2022, Russia has seized over 19,000 Ukrainian children and deported them to Russia. While the children have not been killed, there is great pain and loss for family members and the country. Russia seeks to strip these children of their culture, identify and history. The Russian schools they are forced to attend, along with their adoptive parents, are seeking to brainwash them to be loyal servants to Russia.

The Nazis applied a similar strategy in WWII when they forcibly relocated over 200,000 Polish children who they believed had Aryan traits and sought to Germanize them. The younger children were adopted by families of SS soldiers while the older ones were sent to “home schools” run by the SS. The children were given German names and were forced to learn the German language and history and adopt German customs.

Much like Hitler sought to paint the deportation of children from Poland as a benign act in the best interests of the children, so is the case with Vladimir Putin.

Putin has portrayed this as a compassionate act on the part of the Russian people in taking charge of children who are orphans or refugees from war-torn areas of Ukraine. He has changed the law so that the children may more quickly obtain Russian citizenship and be adopted by Russian families.

People from nations around the world have seen through this masquerade. They have heard reports from relatives in the Ukraine seeking the return of their children, knowing that these children were not orphans or willing participants and that Russia has created barriers to prevent the children from being returned to their families.

The forced deportation of children and young people from Ukraine represents a slow form of genocide. Putin realizes that if you wish to wrench the heart out of a nation, you seize its greatest possessions — its children and its future.

The heinous nature of this act has been acknowledged by world leaders. The World Court in The Hague in March identified the deportation of Ukraine children as a war crime, and the International Court issued warrants and charged Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner on children’s rights, with war crimes.

The deportation of Ukrainian children harms Ukraine today and robs the country of its future. It gives Ukraine, which already has had millions of people displaced and has lost or had seriously wounded thousands of young people in the war, an additional hurdle in its recovery. It also helps to ensure that, no matter how the current war ends, Ukraine will be weakened and Russia will have an opportunity to seize and annex Ukraine in the future.

While the U.S. and other nations have decried the abduction of Ukrainian children, the limited actions taken by the West have done little to stop the deportation of additional children. Tougher sanctions and greater penalties with real teeth are needed to ensure that Ukraine’s children are returned and to send the message that actions like this will not be tolerated by the world.

Greg Fulton is a New Castle native living in Denver.