The UK has cracked down on Vladimir Putin's evil band of child kidnappers who have deported and brainwashed thousands of Ukrainian children.
After 1,000 days of war in Ukraine, the UK government has named, shamed and sanctioned 10 sick masterminds behind the kidnapping of children to be tortured and “re-educated”.
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Nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children, including disabled children, were kidnapped from a special needs school and herded across the border.
About 6,000 displaced youth are believed to be being held in sinister “zombie” camps.
In these hellholes, children, forced to speak Russian, are brainwashed in a three-stage plan to erase their Ukrainian identity and replace it with Kremlin propaganda.
They were told that their loved ones had abandoned them and that they belonged to Russia before their official documents were changed.
Then Putin's minions drop them into Russian families.
Those responsible for child abductions sometimes change the spelling of children's names to make rescue attempts more difficult.
One of the conspirators sanctioned by the UK, Vitaki Aleksandrovich Sok, was harvesting disabled children by extracting them from the special needs boarding school he ran.
Sanctions were also imposed on the military-patriotic social movement of the All-Russian Youth Army (Unarmia), Russia's militant paramilitary youth club, which plays a key role in the kidnapping programme.
Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, told The Sun last month that children in these camps who resist their Russian captors are being tortured in private rooms.
The thugs force them to spend days in windowless “torture chambers” without food and water until they accept that they are Russian citizens and sing the national anthem.
Traumatized children who returned home spoke of being beaten in isolation cells and forced to watch their jailers burn the Ukrainian flag.
The MP also warned that children are being forced to join Russian military training, which is part of Putin's plan to revamp his army and make Ukrainians fight against their own people.
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“I was kidnapped by a Russian soldier”
Ilya, 11, was deported from Mariupol after a Russian missile strike killed his mother and left him with horrific shrapnel wounds when he was nine.
His neighbors buried his mother's body in their backyard before Vlad's soldiers kidnapped him and took him for surgery at a camp in Donetsk.
The splinters were removed without any anesthetic and he was forced to write and speak in Russian and repeat the phrase “Glory to Ukraine as part of Russia.”
He says Russian forces tried to turn him into a “propaganda tool” but he is not “someone who can be fooled so easily.”
Elijah's grandmother has been searching for her grandson since she lost contact with her daughter in March 2022.
It was only after she saw the little boy in a video from Russia that the girl realized that he was alone and that her daughter had been killed.
His grandmother never gave up hope and set out to bring her injured grandson back home where he belonged.
Months later, Ilya returned home to Ukraine and underwent another surgery to remove more shrapnel from his leg while 11 shrapnel remained.
“He had a school, he had a house, he had a mother, and he lost all of that — his whole childhood,” his grandmother Olena said.
“He isolated himself, he was afraid of noise, he was afraid of sirens. He had no memory.
He now dreams of becoming a doctor so he can help fighters on the front lines as a combat medic.
Dmytro said Putin was overseeing a “genocide” of Ukrainian children.
He said: “Children must spend a period of time in special camps.
“Children have to stay in the camps for two weeks, sometimes two months.”
But this is just the first stage.
The second step involves changing the child's Ukrainian documents and giving him a new identity.
Dmytro added: “If a child has Ukrainian documents, for example a birth certificate or a passport, the Russians take these documents and give Russian documents to the child.
“We see that Russians often change information, change names, date of birth and place of birth.”
The final stage is to place the lost child with a Russian family where his brainwashing continues.
They are forced to attend Russian school every day, and eventually are forced to forget their Ukrainian heritage completely.
A monthly cash bonus is used to motivate families to accept Ukrainian children.
Of the 20,000 children stolen from Ukraine, at least 555 are feared dead and 1,429 injured, according to Dmytro's “Bring Back the Children” initiative.
Dmytro said the real numbers could be much higher.
David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, pledged: “No child should ever be used as a pawn in war.”
He said that Putin's “targeting of Ukrainian children” shows the “horrifying depths” to which he will delve in his mission to “wipe Ukraine and its people off the map.”
He reiterated the UK's “iron” support for Ukraine against Putin's illegal invasion.
During a thousand days of grim war, nearly 12,000 Ukrainian civilians were massacred, and 10 million were forced from their homes.
The Russian army suffered casualties exceeding 700,000 soldiers, and it was announced today that Ukraine fired long-range American missiles on its territory for the first time.
News of the strike came just hours after Vladimir Putin gave the green light for a new nuclear doctrine, in response to new missile authorizations for Ukraine.
He equated the use of Western weapons by Ukraine with an act of aggression by those allied countries that supply it with weapons.
The Kremlin said this represented a crossing of a red line, officially putting nuclear retaliation on the table.
Named and shamed: List of Putin's child kidnappers sanctioned by the UK
By Patrick Harrington, foreign news correspondent
The full list of Russian child kidnappers sanctioned by the UK today:
- National-military social movement of the All-Russian Youth Army (Yunarmia)
- Nikita Vladimirovich Nagorny
- Igor Kazarizov
- Andrei Sabinov
- Seraphim Vikentievich Ivanov
- Vanguard
- Olena Oleksandrevna Shaburova
- Valentina Vasilievna Lavrik
- Tetyana Zawalska
- Vitaly Alexandrovich Suk
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