From Monday, new parents in the Luhansk region will be able to leave a maternity hospital with their baby only after proving that at least one of them holds a Russian passport. Otherwise, the newborn would be “confiscated” to the family, at least according to what Artem Lysohor, the head of administration of the Ukrainian region, claims. In other words, in the territories occupied by Russia it will only be possible to be born as Russians, at least potentially, and before giving birth the couple will have to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. A rule which, according to the Kyiv authorities, would trigger the accusation of “genocide”, based on Article 3 of the Genocide Convention which also includes “measures intended to prevent births within the persecuted group”.
The Luhansk territory is almost entirely under Russian occupation, in some areas since 2014, and Lysohor governs it in the name of the Ukrainian government only on paper. Consequently, even the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which reports the news on the imposition of Russian citizenship on newborns in the region, makes the premise “in case the news had been reported accurately”. Nothing impossible, however: the same ISW report mentions a series of acts on the “forced integration of Ukrainian citizens into the Russian system” in the occupied territories: only in the last few days several Ukrainian families have been moved from the Kherson region to Crimea or other areas under Russian control, further from the front, and civilians from the Zaporizhzhia region were deported across the border, to Rostov-on-Don. The same Russian occupation authorities also published the news about the movement of dozens of children from Kherson to the “Oceano” youth camp, on the other side of the world, near Vladivostok, where 200 Ukrainian children should be sent this year who, according to the testimonies of those who have already been there, they are indoctrinated in Russian militarism and invited to enroll in schools deep in Russia.
The pressure on the population of the occupied Ukrainian territories to force them to choose Russian citizenship is numerous: from bureaucratic problems in accessing welfare or schools to medical assistance: in some areas, diabetes patients who insisted on remaining Ukrainian were threatened with run out of insulin. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the main target has been children: Ukraine accuses Moscow of having illegally deported more than 20 thousand minors to Russia, including several thousand orphans. Many of them were adopted under accelerated procedures: the leader of the Just Russia party Sergey Mironov, one of the most ardent supporters of Putinism, took an 11-month-old girl, Margarita Prokopenko, despite the fact that she had two brothers and an adoptive mother in Ukraine. The little girl’s name and place of birth were changed to make her appear Russian. The same fate befell Vania, a child from Donetsk, whose story was revealed a few days ago by the Russian TV in exile Dozhd: although he had an older sister, he was handed over to a Russian family. The adoptive mother told the cameras that Vania, who is now 6 years old, had insisted for a long time on repeating her real surname: “But now he is calm when he says my surname, now he is forgetting his previous life”, she said. explained satisfied.
It was precisely the crime of the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia that earned Vladimir Putin, and his commissioner for children’s rights Maria Lvova-Belova, the indictment at the International Tribunal in The Hague, and the arrest warrant that now prevents to the Russian president to travel halfway around the world. Perhaps it was also this humiliation that pushed the Kremlin yesterday to declare Volodymyr Zelensky, his predecessor in the presidency Petro Poroshenko and a series of high-ranking Ukrainian military commanders “wanted” – for unspecified crimes. Mandates which obviously will not have any international legal value, unlike that for Putin and Lvova-Belova, who just a few days ago was accused of the deportation to Russia of mentally disabled Ukrainians, who are entrusted to the hospice run by her sister .
Meanwhile, the operation to erase Ukraine from memory continues not only against the orphans of Donbass, but against all Russians: the weekly propaganda lesson “Important Conversations” which will be held on Monday in all Russian schools is dedicated to the anniversary of the victory over Nazism, but from the teaching materials published by the Ministry of Education there is no mention of Ukrainians among the peoples who fought against Hitler’s Germany.
