An “overwhelming majority” of the 700,000 Ukrainian children arrived in Russia with their parents or relatives, the Russian children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova said without offering further details. A UN-backed investigation has determined that Russia’s forced transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children to Russian-controlled territories amounts to a war crime. Lvova-Belova and President Vladimir Putin are under an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.
Russia: Worried about ethnic minorities revolting, send everyone of them that can hold a gun to the front to get killed.
Also Russia: Let’s transfer 700,000 Ukrainians into Russia in a world of unblockable internet and DNA tests. Surely propaganda will make this safe.
It is a bad policy if your goal is governance.
But it hits a lot of Russia’s tick marks - replenishes the other ethnic minorities they’ve gotten killed, meaning more to get killed in 20 years; rewards “good” families with kids; if even 10% of the kids begin to identify as Russian, they have ready made propaganda right there; and if some go hard the other way, they might commit some sort of crime, and Russia can use that as propaganda fuel too.
The thing about regressive pieces of shit is that they can spin anything to their advantage through a mixture of whataboutism, narcissistic lies, and rampant hypocrisy.