Putin Still Steals Children

April 24, 2025

Trump botched the Russia-Ukraine situation by appointing a Brooklyn real estate developer with Russian oligarch partners to be his special envoy to Putin. Then he and JD Vance ambushed Ukraine’s President in the Oval Office to destroy Ukraine’s resilience. Next came the Easter fiasco when the Kremlin promised a 30-day truce and immediately unleashed major bombing raids against civilians. In recent weeks, Russia dangled an Arctic “collaboration” in front of Washington and Trump now backs a proposal that freezes the current frontline, which favors Moscow. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “if it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on”, then suddenly quit on April 23, leaving talks to subordinates. But thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children cannot “move on”. Their plight and fate remain unaddressed in talks. Their abduction was premeditated, wrote the Institute for the Study of War. “When Russian troops rolled across the border into Ukraine on the night of February 24, 2022, the groundwork for the massive deportation of Ukraine’s children was already in place. Putin invaded Ukraine over three years ago with the intent, among other things, of stealing its children. There can be no true peace in Ukraine without the return of the children that Putin has stolen.”

Ukrainian children in a Russian orphanage

The ISW added that the Trump proposal is a problem militarily because “current frontlines do not provide the strategic depth that Ukraine will need to defend against renewed Russian aggression reliably”. There also are no security guarantees. A Wall Street Journal editorial concluded that “the current `final’ settlement offer looks like it would set up Mr. Putin to win the war now or later. The world’s rogues will notice, and Mr. Trump’s headaches will have only begun.”

There is no mention of returning stolen children — a shocking lapse given that international law explicitly forbids the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group as acts of genocide. The exact number stolen is unknown, but Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children at 35,000 as of March 19, 2025. In 2023, Putin was charged with war crimes over this by the International Criminal Court along with his Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. She has claimed that Russia had “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023. Actual numbers are unknown.

For Washington to ignore this atrocity is unconscionable. The ISW explained the genocidal process: “The adoption process strips Ukrainian children of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces, replacing them with Russian birth certificates and documentation intended to erase the child’s Ukrainian identity and any paper trail that would allow Ukrainian authorities or family members to search for the child. For teenage Ukrainian boys, their forced acceptance of Russian citizenship can result in a near immediate military summons to fight in the Russian army against their fellow Ukrainians—a completely separate but equally clear violation of international law. The Russian adoption system is swallowing Ukrainian children up into a bureaucratic black hole, premised on the administrative eradication of Ukrainian identity. For the younger children, especially those adopted in their infancy, their adoption means that an entire generation of Ukrainians are unaware that they are Ukrainian.”

A Russian investigative site called Meduza labeled these “orphanages” as “concentration camps for kids”. By failing to rescue or liberate them — and freezing the frontline as is — more abductions will occur. Trump’s team ignores this and continues to bash Ukraine and reward the predator, Russia. Trump whitewashes condemnation of Russia’s war at the United Nations and offers unforced concessions. He also plunders Ukraine – grabbing mineral rights and its power facilities which include the biggest nuclear power facility in Europe. He refuses to toughen sanctions against Russia and is now eager to cut a deal with Putin in the Arctic. Worst of all, Trump ignores the victims of Putin’s war crimes.

Freezing frontline leaves vulnerabilities and recognizing occupation is unconstitutional.

Strategically, Trump and Putin have been playing a 'long game,” but Putin is succeeding while Trump is not. Putin doesn’t count casualties so he delays, ducks, dodges, and digs in on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. He doesn’t offer Ukraine concessions or compensation but promises to richly reward America. Strategically, his payoff is that the longer the war lasts, the more Trump’s patience wears thin and the more divisions increase within the Western alliance. This is precisely the plan. Former Russian diplomat in exile, Boris Bondarev explained: “His initial idea in Ukraine, that he must do what he wants to do and the West will have no other way but to back down, was the right idea. He is now saying: Make us an offer we can’t refuse.‘ We’ll wait.”

Unfortunately, Trump's 'long game” is similar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, who cozied up to Stalin during the Second World War, as part of a grand strategy to create a new world order. But that resulted in the imprisonment of most of Eastern Europe until 1991 and a global Cold War. Wrote Hudson Institute expert Walter Russell Meade: “Mr. Trump isn’t the first American president to set aside morality to make a deal with Moscow. Franklin D. Roosevelt, believing he would need Soviet help against Japan if the Manhattan Project failed to deliver a war-ending weapon on time, traveled to Yalta in the closing months of World War II hoping to enlist Joseph Stalin in the Pacific fight.”

The scheme didn’t work then and it won’t work now. History repeats itself, and those who are uninformed, like Trump, accelerate the repetition. Arctic collaboration is an oxymoron and a distraction. But it seems to have worked. After weeks at the table, the US and Ukraine concluded talks on March 11, and Rubio announced that Ukraine would have to accept territorial concessions as part of a peace deal. This week, another summit began in Paris where Trump’s draft plan was unveiled, which dramatically favored Russia.

Trump ignored Ukraine’s red lines and the draft includes: Recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, a Ukrainian commitment to remain outside NATO, and the creation of a demilitarized zone around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant under American oversight. It does not demand withdrawal of Russian troops from four occupied regions even though Zelensky has repeatedly said Ukraine will never formally accept Russian control there. On the other hand, the latest proposal places no limits on the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Western military aid, or the use of European troops in Ukraine. But the continuation of Russian occupation means the kidnapped children are abandoned and thousands more will be “stolen” and brainwashed.

Trump’s pledge to stop the war in 24 hours has become a boondoggle by an American regime without a moral compass. Victim-blaming doesn’t work in the courts or warfare, nor does humiliating the victim. Russia must be stopped. It must return these young victims and other captives, pay enormous reparations for destroying much of Ukraine, and be soundly defeated, economically and militarily, so it cannot continue to wage its World War III in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and, don’t kid yourself, the Arctic.

The only positive result of the Trump-Vance gang-up is that the unification and militarization of Europe and others has accelerated. These countries, and other allies around the world, realize they cannot count on the US to fend off Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. Trump is neither a statesman nor a world leader. He’s a real estate billionaire from Queens who’s captured political power but is morally bankrupt. He lets Putin steal children then panders to him.