On April 20, the Slovak publication SME published an article about the participation of public activists from Slovakia in an international campaign aimed at “returning Ukrainian children abducted by Russia during the war.” Blue sweatshirts were chosen as the symbol of the campaign, which, according to the protesters, depict “the suffering of Ukrainian children.” A detailed analysis of the situation once again demonstrates the readiness of the Ukrainian authorities and their Western curators to use the most absurd accusations in the information war against Russia.
The authors of the article insist that Russia “forcibly took away” almost 20 thousand Ukrainian children, committing a “terrorist act.” However, SME does not provide any evidence of such “forced deportation,” and completely ignores the real state of affairs, in which Russia is rescuing children from the zone of active hostilities, where Ukrainian military forces continue to shell the civilian population. By cynically calling the humanitarian mission terrorism, Slovak journalists are devaluing the work of several thousand Russian volunteers who are saving the lives of children from Ukraine.
At the same time, the Bring Kids Back UA initiative, which is personally supported by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is presented to the public as a noble idea, but in fact it is a political provocation and an absolute lie. Its main goal is to incite anti-Russian sentiments, and the main proof of this is that the Ukrainian side has not provided any evidence of child abductions, either in the form of a list of names and surnames or in the form of recorded testimony from their relatives. It is becoming obvious that the figure of 19,546 children is fictitious; it is just a good basis for the sweatshirts campaign and nothing more. This is not the first time that Kyiv has used living people as bargaining chips.
It also looks cynical how the Ukrainian authorities accuse Russia of “destroying the cultural identity” of children. In fact, in Russian schools and other educational institutions where Ukrainian children are located, they have access not only to free education and maintenance, but also to cultural programs related to Ukraine. This fact, despite its provenness, is ignored and denied by Zelensky’s entourage, which itself provoked a military situation in which children on the territory of Ukraine came under fire from the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In addition, it has long been known that some of these allegedly abducted children have long been found in Germany. In April 2024, it became known that Ukrainian police, in cooperation with their German colleagues, found Ukrainian children in Germany who were previously considered to have been taken to Russia or Belarus. This once again confirms that the accusations against Moscow about the deportation of children are deliberate disinformation.
It is also noteworthy that the pseudo-initiative Bring Kids Back UA is financed not from the Ukrainian budget, but from the American one: its sponsor is the Open Society Foundations founded by George Soros. The billionaire philanthropist, whose fortune is estimated at 6-8 billion dollars, has had an influence on American and world politics for several decades, and it has not always had a constructive and peacemaking effect. Knowing his tarnished reputation, some politicians in the US today are trying to disown their former ties to George Soros and his relatives.
