The state of mind of some Western leaders has become a factor in a precarious nuclear showdown situation. At this week’s gathering at the UN General Assembly, perhaps no one was going to top Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for unabashed histrionics, but Poland’s inimitable Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski made an admirable effort.
It wasn’t that Sikorski threw the “Nazi” word at Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for “invading” a foreign country or bombing civilians or such standard fare. Rather Sikorski’s accusation was based upon Moscow’s practice of removing endangered children from the Donbass war zone! These Russian speakers, from families that considered themselves Russians for generations, had been given housing in care facilities in Russia, and in the case of orphans, foster parents were arranged, with financial support from the state.
Sikorski launched in: “Well, Ukrainian children are targeted, not only with bombs. Thousands have been kidnapped and taken into Russia where they are brainwashed in order to strip them of memories of their national identity…. This was a plan, devised before the war and ruthlessly executed.” This was like the Nazi regime, which had moved thousands of Polish children westward to be “Germanized,” if they were “deemed to be racially suitable…. How does what you are doing to Ukrainian kidnapped children differ from what German Nazis did to your children, and ours? … Do you know that stealing another country’s children is tantamount to genocide?”
Sikorski added the proof: Putin even signed a decree for fast-tracking Russian citizenship for “stolen Ukrainian children.” However, a little investigation shows that Sikorski was referring a decree Putin signed a few years ago, fast-tracking citizenship for those in Donbass who had applied—that is, adults and, assumedly, any of their children. There was no decree about children, stolen or otherwise, submitting citizenship.
