After the Nord Stream pipeline got blowed up, commentators like Rod Dreher started just asking questions:
It's about the underwater sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. Tucker points out that there is no good reason at all for Russia to have sabotaged these pipelines. Why would the Russians render inoperable the source of their economic leverage over Europe? I mean, maybe they did do it, but it's hard to understand why, given that if they wanted to cut off gas to Europe, they have the power without destroying their own equipment.
I am a family lawyer, so I’ve worked on many cases in which people are trying to get parenting time with their children, or have them returned to their homes after being in foster care. Obviously, it’s an emotional and stressful process for everyone involved.
So it might be understandable when one of the parents lashes out in court and screams expletives at the social workers and the lawyers and the judge. But it sure doesn’t help their case. You can tell them this over and over. Maybe they even understand that it’s a bad idea.
But they do it anyway. (And then, when their children have been taken into permanent care, it’s because their lawyer didn't “fight” for them. But that’s another story.)
In 2022, one country in particular has been acting like the belligerent parent who believes blind rage will help her get her kids back and/or places a higher priority on expressing her blind rage than actually accomplishing her goal.
One key difference, though: while the parents are trying to get their children back, the country is taking children away.
You have to give the Russians this much: between their “children’s rights commissioner” and their propaganda chief (whom I think even Putin is a little scared of) they’re striking a blow for feminism by proving that women are just as capable of committing crimes against humanity as their male counterparts.
This video is making the rounds on Twitter today. If it really shows what it purports to show (more on that in a moment) we are watching innocent children being literally stolen on camera:
The exact number of Ukrainian children being shipped off to Russia isn't known - I've seen estimates ranging from four digits to six - but the abductions are definitely happening:
Russia’s open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian is already well underway, in one of the most explosive issues of the war, an Associated Press investigation shows.
Thousands of children have been found in the basements of war-torn cities like Mariupol and at orphanages in the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donbas. They include those whose parents were killed by Russian shelling as well as others in institutions or with foster families, known as “children of the state.”
Russia claims that these children don’t have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can’t be reached. But the AP found that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren’t wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship.
[…]
Even where parents are dead, Rapp said, their children must be sheltered, fostered or adopted in Ukraine rather than deported to Russia.
Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children. But in May, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Russia to adopt and give citizenship to Ukrainian children without parental care — and harder for Ukraine and surviving relatives to win them back.
Russia also has prepared a register of suitable Russian families for Ukrainian children, and pays them for each child who gets citizenship — up to $1,000 for those with disabilities. It holds summer camps for Ukrainian orphans, offers “patriotic education” classes and even runs a hotline to pair Russian families with children from Donbas.
“It is absolutely a terrible story,” said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor, who claims hundreds of children were taken from that city alone. “We don’t know if our children have an official parent or (stepparents) or something else because they are forcibly disappeared by Russian troops.”
May God protect the children of Ukraine. And may He have mercy on the children of Russia, because the world will show no mercy toward their parents.
I added a qualifier about the accuracy of that shocking video, because even in a war where one side is very clearly in the right, the good guys can still willingly or unwittingly spread misleading propaganda of their own.
For example, you probably saw photos of a box of gold teeth found in a Ukrainian village, purportedly evidence of shocking torture by the Russian troops who had until recently occupied the region. Germany’s Bild, however, says the teeth have a much more mundane origin:
However, the teeth that were found apparently do not come from dead or tortured people – but from patients of the local dentist.
“The teeth look like from my stolen collection,” says Sergey (60). BILD had shown him the ministry’s picture. “I’m the only dentist here. So if they were found here, they must be by me.”
[…]
Asked whether the crowns might come from dead people, the dentist replies: “My God, no! They come from people I have treated all those years. I took these teeth out because they were bad.”
The doctor tells BILD: “Over the course of 30 years, I have removed tens of thousands of teeth. This is just a fraction of them. Sometimes, I pull out five to eight teeth in one day. I have been doing this for 33 years.”
Dentists are weird, man.
Russia’s propaganda broadcaster is crowing about the story being debunked, but its online article doesn’t actually link to the Bild website. That’s probably because the Russian occupiers still don’t come out of this looking good:
…One thing is certain: gruesome torture did take place in the village, just as in many other places occupied by the Russians. Several locals told BILD that they kept hearing cries for help from various buildings.
Volodya (46) was one of the victims of torture by the Russian soldiers in Pisky-Radkivski. A neighbour had denounced him as pro-Ukrainian. Volodya: “They just took me with them. While I was beaten, they said to me: ‘If you don’t work for us, we’ll shoot you in the legs, and that’s it’. The other one said: ‘We should shoot him in the legs, we’ll have to deal with him just like with the other one’. The room and ceiling were full of bullet holes. I think they wanted to scare the person who was there before me.”
Andrey (46) was held by the Russians for weeks. His wife Olga told BILD: “About eight people came to our farm. Two controlled our papers. They gave me my papers back, but they took my husband with them, because he was on the list.”
Andrey was gone for two months. Russian soldiers kept him in a basement for five days, beat him up, and transported him to different cities and places. He was forced to clean the streets there. Later, they forced him to dig trenches in Lyman for the Russian soldiers.
We should always be careful about viral stories designed to inflame passions, but that doesn’t mean we should lose sight of the bigger picture. (As James Lileks once noted, some people insist that high-profile hoaxes about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait were much more offensive than…the actual Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.)
On Friday, I rode my bike to work to save gas.
No good deed goes unpunished.
That’s a feature, not a bug, isn’t it?