The Kremlin children’s rights advocate accused of war crimes for overseeing Moscow’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children is now openly mocking Ukrainian families who try to get their children back from Russia, according to a local report.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum on Thursday, Maria Lvova-Belova described Ukrainian children forcibly transported to Russia as if they were in need of fixing, lamenting that Russia will have to “re-educate” them after eight years of “powerful propaganda” in Ukraine, according to the local outlet Rotonda Media.
Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador has said nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children were ripped away from their families or taken from orphanages during the war and forcibly transported to Russia. Investigations by the Associated Press and independent Russia media outlets found that in many cases the children were taken away and described as “orphans” in Russian propaganda despite having Ukrainian family members or parents. Some of them were quickly adopted out to Russian families.
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Lvova-Belova—who herself adopted a Ukrainian teenager yanked out of Mariupol—scoffed at the idea Russia is committing war crimes by kidnapping children.
“When they say, ‘Return our children,’ where should we return them? To abusers? To those who didn’t take care of them?” she said Thursday, according to Rotonda.
She reportedly briefly mentioned the teenager she adopted, Filipp, while complaining about how difficult it is to “reform” Ukrainian children.
“The kind of propaganda that was used in Ukraine will not pass so easily,” she was quoted saying, describing it as a “struggle” for Russian families to overcome.
(Early last month, Lvova-Belova unironically told reporters how “difficult” it was for her when her Ukrainian “son” shared how proud he was to hold up a Ukrainian flag at a protest and chased around her other children saying, “I will eat the Muscovite!”)
Left unmentioned in her latest speech, of course, was that her “son” still has legal guardians in Ukraine, as Radio Free Europe’s “Schemes” investigative reporting project revealed last month.
Lvova-Belova—who was reportedly mockingly introduced ahead of her speech as an “international criminal who is wanted all over the world”—went on to express outrage over what she called an “outright provocation”: Ukrainian authorities trying to track down the children who were whisked off to Russia.
“They search for the children through social networks and ask them to make videos about how hard it is for them to live in Russia,” she was quoted saying.
In keeping with the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is “saving” the Ukrainian children they forcibly deport, Lvova-Belova also claimed Moscow took in 31 kids who were “collected from basements” in Mariupol after being “abandoned” by their families, and expressed indignation at the “wave of negativity” she said resulted when the father of several of the children demanded them back.
