Russian President Vladimir Putin did his best impression of a normal human being on Tuesday to put on a show for the International Day for the Protection of Children, vowing to “do everything” to help children whose lives have been upended by his war in Ukraine.
“On the day for the protection of children, it’s impossible not to remember the children in the Donbas, who have been subjected to lethal dangers for eight years,” the Russian leader said during a video conference with families.
In keeping with the Kremlin’s tried-and-tested propaganda, he put the blame for the children’s suffering squarely on Ukrainian forces, blaming the “Kyiv regime” for the many children killed and injured, despite overwhelming evidence of a deliberate campaign by his own troops to target civilian families in a bid to crush Ukrainian resistance since the all-out invasion on Feb. 24.
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“Many [children] lost their parents, and there are some who have been left completely without families. We will do everything to guarantee them all measures of social support. … And, of course, we will help children who’ve lost their loved ones to obtain the same loving, friendly, and generous families as yours,” he told the Russian families in attendance.
Putin’s comments were jarring enough in light of the more than 240 Ukrainian children prosecutors there say have been killed since Moscow’s soldiers launched an all-out war on Feb. 24, but they seemed all the more nauseating since Ukrainian authorities revealed Tuesday that more than 243,000 kids have been forcibly removed from the country—and many of them separated from their parents in Russia.
That staggering figure was announced at a briefing Tuesday by Daria Gerasimchuk, adviser to the Ukrainian president’s commissioner for children’s rights, according to local media reports.
“Russia is mercilessly taking away lives and destroying futures, maiming and raping, making orphans of our youngest generation,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Iryna Venediktova, wrote in a statement on Facebook to mark the holiday.
She said the forced deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia was part of authorities’ war crimes investigation, as it is “direct evidence of a plan to destroy the nation.”
“From the testimony of those who have saved themselves, we know about these horrors that Russian troops are forcibly transporting people to Russia, where the children are separated from their mothers. They then send the mothers to Sakhalin, and the children to other cities. Is this really the 21st century?” Venediktova wrote.
Ukrainian authorities said earlier this month that about 2,000 of the Ukrainian children taken to Russia were orphans who Russian authorities planned to adopt out to local families. Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry has said some of those forcibly deported to Russia for potential “illegal” adoptions were children whose parents were killed at the hands of Putin’s troops.
UNICEF also provided a sobering counterpoint to Putin’s disturbing show of supposed graciousness Tuesday, saying in a statement on the eve of the holiday that at least two children in Ukraine are being killed each day, “mostly in attacks using explosive weapons in populated areas.”
“Nearly 100 days of war in Ukraine have wrought devastating consequences for children at a scale and speed not seen since World War II,” UNICEF said.
