Diane Francis: Putin still steals children

by Diane Francis, Editor-at-Large at the National Post, columnist at the Kyiv Post, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Eurasia Center and author, publisher on Substack

Source: Francis on Substack

Trump botched the Russia-Ukraine situation by appointing a Brooklyn real estate developer with Russian oligarch partners to be his special envoy to Putin. Then he and JD Vance ambushed Ukraine’s President in the Oval Office to destroy Ukraine’s resilience. Next came the Easter fiasco when the Kremlin promised a 30-day truce and immediately unleashed major bombing raids against civilians. 

In recent weeks, Russia dangled an Arctic “collaboration” in front of Washington and Trump now backs a proposal that freezes the current frontline, which favors Moscow. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “if it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on”, then suddenly quit on April 23, leaving talks to subordinates. But thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children cannot “move on”. Their plight and fate remain unaddressed in talks. Their abduction was premeditated, wrote the Institute for the Study of War. 

“When Russian troops rolled across the border into Ukraine on the night of February 24, 2022, the groundwork for the massive deportation of Ukraine’s children was already in place. Putin invaded Ukraine over three years ago with the intent, among other things, of stealing its children. There can be no true peace in Ukraine without the return of the children that Putin has stolen.”

The ISW added that the Trump proposal is a problem militarily because “current frontlines do not provide the strategic depth that Ukraine will need to defend against renewed Russian aggression reliably”. There also are no security guarantees. A Wall Street Journal editorial concluded that “the current `final’ settlement offer looks like it would set up Mr. Putin to win the war now or later. The world’s rogues will notice, and Mr. Trump’s headaches will have only begun.”

There is no mention of returning stolen children — a shocking lapse given that international law explicitly forbids the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group as acts of genocide. The exact number stolen is unknown, but Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children at 35,000 as of March 19, 2025. In 2023, Putin was charged with war crimes over this by the International Criminal Court along with his Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. She has claimed that Russia had “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023. Actual numbers are unknown.

For Washington to ignore this atrocity is unconscionable. The ISW explained the genocidal process: “The adoption process strips Ukrainian children of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces, replacing them with Russian birth certificates and documentation intended to erase the child’s Ukrainian identity and any paper trail that would allow Ukrainian authorities or family members to search for the child. For teenage Ukrainian boys, their forced acceptance of Russian citizenship can result in a near immediate military summons to fight in the Russian army against their fellow Ukrainians — a completely separate but equally clear violation of international law. The Russian adoption system is swallowing Ukrainian children up into a bureaucratic black hole, premised on the administrative eradication of Ukrainian identity. For the younger children, especially those adopted in their infancy, their adoption means that an entire generation of Ukrainians are unaware that they are Ukrainian.”

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