Ukraine's missing children
The Russian peace proposal
In the last post, I set out eleven key points in Russia’s peace proposal as I guessed that these would likely be ignored by Western media (see below). The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, spent some time answering specific questions about children “taken” from Ukraine1. His answer was interesting for a number of reasons.
On the positive side, he acknowledged that there was a need to reunite some families and that this item was included in the Russian peace proposal. He stated that the Ukrainian side had presented a list of 339 children and that he had undertaken to check, which of these children are in Russia.
He explained that this issue had been grotesquely manipulated for propaganda purposes with Ukraine and its backers throwing out wild figures up to 11,000 missing children. The purpose of the propaganda was to enrage Western audiences. He mentioned the famous case where the fabricated 1990 testimony of a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl “Nayirah” in Washington was used to manipulate U.S. public opinion and achieve a Senate vote to authorise U.S. military intervention. Nayirah claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait throwing babies out of incubators in order to steal the incubators2.
This tear-soaked testimony ensured that the “nail-biting” January 1991 Senate vote passed by 52 to 47 and Bush (senior) received authorisation to use the U.S. military in Kuwait. It was discovered that the whole story was bogus and that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. and the testimony had been orchestrated by a Washington PR firm, Hill & Knowlton. By the time this hoax was exposed the ship had long since sailed.
Medinsky also referred to the classic film “Wag the Dog”, where a spin doctor works with a movie producer to fabricate a war in Albania in order to distract the public from the fact that the U.S. President, who was running for re-election, had been caught making sexual advances to an underage girl inside the Oval Office3. In a famous scene they fabricate some visuals to get public opinion on board with the fictitious war in Albania. They also chose to show a young girl running in front of a green screen and then proceeded to add a small kitten and burning buildings in order to generate maximum emotional manipulation. Interestingly the film was released a few weeks before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke.
Medinsky also referred to the embarrassing fact that European authorities have been removing children from Ukrainian families due to non-compliance with various European legal requirements. He even claimed that relatives had been contacting Russian consulates to intervene in these cases.
The initial furore over thousands of missing children in Ukraine broke out when the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL) published a “report” in February 2023 estimating that there were 6,000 Ukrainian children who were in Crimea or Russia4. Yale HRL is a “project of the US State Department” so off the bat the story was suspect. When you get into the report itself the media narrative collapses, at page 13 “while many parents signed consent to send their child to a camp for a limited period..”. In addition, “parents reported that they sent their children to camp to remove them from the danger of fighting, to stay somewhere with intact sanitation, or to get nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live.” The report raises a small number of cases where children have not come back on time and questions how freely consent was given in a war, but this report is definitely not a smoking gun pointing to mass disappearances.
Of course, the whole war is a tragedy and particularly the separation of children from their parents, but I find the Russian position to be more credible and focused on reuniting families rather than pushing black propaganda. Whilst Russian politicians are also not boy scouts, it is refreshing to see Russian mainstream news inform viewers about how stunningly dishonest the Western political class can be. This is not something you can expect to see on mainstream Western media.
Let me have your thoughts below.
Summary translation of Russia’s peace proposal – 2nd June 2025
Section 1
1. International legal recognition of the fact that Crimea, Luhansk People’s Republic, Donetsk People’s Republic, Zaparozhiye and Kherson regions accession to the Russian Federation and the withdrawal of all Ukrainian armed forces from those regions.
2. Ukrainian neutrality, implying her refusal to enetr into military alliances and coalitions including a ban on third party country military activities on the territory of Ukraine.
3. Cancelation of and withdrawal from international agreements incompatible with item 2.
4. Confirmation of Ukraine’s status as a non-nuclear (and other weapons of mass extermination) state.
5. Creating a limit to Ukraine’s armed forces and the disbanding of nationalistic unts within Ukrainian armed forces.
6. Guarantee the rights of Russian and Russian-speaking population, make Russian an official language.
7. A legal ban on promoting Nazi and Neo-Nazi ideology.
8. Remove all sanctions between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
9. Deal with multifaceted problem of reuniting families.
9. Announcement of a date for Presidential elections and elections to the Upper Chamber (Verhovnoi Rada) which should take place within 100 days of the cancelation of war footing.
10. Signing of a Agreement to execute the items laid out in Section 1
(Note there appear to be two items numbered 9.)
https://dzen.ru/video/watch/683de1dd08dec82c776c676e
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/russias-systematic-program-for-the-re-education-and-adoption-of-ukraines-children/