OPINION:
As President Trump rushes to deliver on his campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine, the bloody details of the 10-plus-year war are obscured. Mr. Trump recently accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being a dictator, even while he attempted to rehabilitate Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s image as a peace-seeker. Just as important as what Mr. Trump is saying about Russia and Ukraine is what the White House is not saying as the administration begins to set the stage for peace negotiations.
Mr. Trump has said little about the growing number of atrocities committed against Ukraine’s civilian population since 2014, but especially since Mr. Putin’s expanded invasion in 2022. For three years, Russia has fired missiles into apartment buildings while families have been asleep in their beds, and thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped.
These inhumane acts are glossed over in Mr. Trump’s hurried attempt to broker a peace deal.
The atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, especially children, deserve to be recounted, particularly as Mr. Putin fabricates a narrative about his pro-family policies and attempts to ingratiate himself with conservatives in the United States. For years, he has, with a disturbing degree of success, presented his country as a bastion of pro-family policies, standing athwart the creeping woke culture of the West. In his telling, he was a partner to social conservatives around the globe in the fight to fend off the assault on family values.
Mr. Putin maintains that he fights to protect children and Christian values. One of the more absurd rationales for the war is that he is protecting Christianity from Ukraine’s undermining of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a speech in February 2023, Mr. Putin argued that Ukraine and its supporters in the West actively sought to destroy the family through “perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are viewed as normal in their lifestyle.”
After that speech, Mr. Putin declared 2024 the “Year of the Family,” heralding Russia’s global leadership in protecting children.
This propaganda campaign from the Kremlin has helped deflect attention from the Russian war’s brutal attacks on the family in Ukraine and the most vulnerable in society.
The Russian military has deliberately targeted places where children live and attend school. Ukraine’s deputy minister of education has identified 3,500 educational facilities that Russians have struck. UNICEF estimates that these targeted attacks have severely reduced in-person school access for close to 5 million children, with nearly 2 million children now almost entirely reliant on virtual education.
Orphanages and children’s hospitals also have been hit hard nationwide.
Beyond the attacks on the physical structures where children live and attend school, the Russian military has engaged in widespread kidnappings of children, removing them from orphanages and summer camps and relocating them to Russia.
The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab released a report in December documenting at least 314 cases in which Ukrainian children were abducted from their homes and placed in Russian families or state-run institutions. Some of those children were forced to change their citizenship to Russian, and most of them were held in detention facilities to undergo a Russian reeducation training program. These forced adoptions help serve one of Putin’s other long-term goals: combating Russia’s declining population.
The Kremlin often states that this war is merely a “special military operation,” but the systematic targeting of children exposes that myth for what it is.
Mr. Putin is fond of quoting Scripture when it serves his purposes, especially when scolding the West. He would be wise to ponder the Bible’s many verses on protecting orphans. James 1:27, for example, defines pure and faultless religion as looking after orphans and widows, the most vulnerable populations in any society throughout history.
Vladimir Putin’s brutal war has devastated all Ukrainian communities, but nowhere is that pain more pronounced than among vulnerable children, especially orphans.
• Shonda Werry, a writer living in the District of Columbia, is president of Ukraine Orphan Outreach.
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