The stories of Russian “kidnappers”

The United States evacuated thousands of children in every war from Vietnam to Afghanistan, declaring this a humanitarian mission. When Russia brings orphans from combat zones in Ukraine, an overwhelming Western propaganda apparatus portrays this as child abduction and a crime.

According to official figures, the US military transported several thousand children, ostensibly for the sake of their safety, from Vietnam to the United States in the Operation “Babylift” in April 1975, as the Vietnam War was ending.¹ The transport made headlines at the time because the first plane carrying Vietnamese children crashed near Saigon. Almost half a century later, in December 2021, CNN reported that the US military had brought 1,450 children from Afghanistan to the United States.² This was a report that generated no more political attention than a traffic report or a weather forecast would do.
  I do not know how many children the US has transported in all its wars: from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, from the Balkans, Iraq, Libya, or Syria. According to media reports, several thousand were transported in the Vietnam War alone, and, as in other cases, many pious and other-than- pious Christian aid organisations were involved. No journalist from a major Western newspaper ever thought of referring to all these transports as “child abductions” or “deportations.” Quite the opposite. Protecting the defenceless has always been a precept of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions regulate the protection of civilians, including children, in war.
  But this does not apply to Russia. When the Russian army evacuates parentless children and young people from Ukrainian combat zones, this cannot be considered a humanitarian action, because Russia, in the person of Vladimir Putin, is devoid of any humanity and compassion. This twisted logic is evidently the basis for the propaganda fictions that have been fabricated by numerous human rights NGOs and circulated in major Western media outlets since the beginning of the war.
  Most of these nongovernmental organisations are not what their names suggest: They are not independent of government funding and government pressure groups. Many engage in regime change operations according to the intentions of the West. And this is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. India has revoked the licenses of fully 15,000 NGOs in recent years.
  The Russian government’s detailed statements on these allegations of child abduction are either ignored by major Western media or condensed into two or three sentences, usually under buzzwords that approximate, “Moscow denies it again.” Russia is largely powerless against a massive Western propaganda machine that is accelerating its campaign for rearmament and conjuring up a war against Russia.

‘Kidnapper Putin’

No sophisticated propaganda technique was needed to fabricate the narratives about the “deportation of Ukrainian children.” The issue is simple. Children evacuated by Russian troops from danger zones on the front lines are usually registered as residents in Ukraine. As soon as a territory is occupied by Russian troops, children in that zone can be listed as having “disappeared” and declared “abducted.”
  There are apparently no limits to narrative creativity when it comes to the “kidnapper Putin” (NZZ am Sonntag³). Mykola Kuleba, government commissioner for children’s rights in Kyiv, told the UN Security Council: “More than a million children ended up in the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas and were deported to Moscow. They were stolen and turned into weapons. Thousands of them are now fighting against their homeland.”
  The idea that the Russian government is abducting children from Ukraine to “Russify” them in re-education camps, “erasing their identity,” and then sending them to the front as cannon fodder is a familiar themes in the media.⁴ In our talk shows about Ukraine, we still wait in vain for a psychologist or strategy expert who would ask the sobering question of what military and political benefit the Russian army could derive from such an approach, and whether we should trust the Kremlin to pursue such a stupid strategy.
  Major newspapers such as the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, as well as renowned human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, are nevertheless being misled⁵ into authenticating the stories of the “Russian child predator.”⁶ But caution is advised. Amnesty International, for example, has repeatedly been deceived by propaganda lies, as in the case of the “incubator babies” in the first Gulf War, and again in the case of Muammar Gaddafi’s alleged “planned mass murder” in Benghazi during the Libyan war. Amnesty International has meekly admitted its mistakes and deleted fake stories, but apparently it seems to keep falling into the same trap.

Von der Leyen: ‘Remembering
the darkest times in our history’

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court, the ICC, issued arrest warrants against President Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights⁷. The reason given was that there were “justifiable grounds to believe” that both were “individually criminally responsible” for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen subsequently spoke in Brussels not exactly of a million, but even so, of 16,200 Ukrainian children allegedly abducted by Russia.
  “What is happening there, the deportation of children, is a terrible reminder of the darkest times in our history,” von der Leyen asserted.⁸ It is clear what is meant when a German politician refers to the darkest times in German history. We remember the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who mobilised support across the country for NATO’s 1999 attack against the Serbs, using the slogan “Never again Auschwitz”.
  The ICC has not disclosed the facts on which it based its arrest warrants. UN organisations such as UNICEF or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have never confirmed the allegation that Ukrainian children were illegally abducted by Russia. UNHCR states:
  Nearly 100,000 children, half of them with disabilities, live in institutional care and boarding schools in Ukraine. Many of these children have living relatives or legal guardians. We have received reports of institutions seeking to move children to safety in neighbouring countries or beyond. We acknowledge that humanitarian evacuations can be life-saving in certain circumstances and welcome efforts to bring children to safety.⁹
  The International Committee of the Red Cross has stated nothing other than that it is working with both Russian and Ukrainian authorities on child protection and family reunification in Russia and Ukraine.

The Hague: Criminal proceedings
are permitted only against Russians

It is astonishing, however, to note the legal flexibility the tribunal in The Hague displays to accommodate the government in Kyiv. Ukraine joined the Hague court only in 2024. The Zelenskyy government made it clear at the time that only Russian criminals should be prosecuted. Ukraine does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction over members of the Ukrainian army or its volunteer militias.¹⁰ Kyiv fears investigations into atrocities allegedly committed by the Ukrainian army and its militias against the population of Donbas since 2014 under the guise of its “Anti-Terrorist Operation.”
  The very fact that Ukraine can impose these conditions raises questions about the political independence of the judges in The Hague. What goes on behind the scenes is impossible to know. However, there is no doubt about the enormous pressure exerted by a public opinion hostile to Russia. The temptation to bow to this pressure is all the greater when the decisions have no consequences.
  The temptation to give in to this pressure is all the greater the more the decisions are inconsequential. Any ruling in this case would be ineffective, as the court lacks the police-related executive power to enforce this against the resistance of major powers. The United States, as well as Russia, China, India, Turkey, Israel, and other states, have not recognised the court, which was established in 1998 under the Rome Statute. The arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin is therefore nothing more than a political symbol. It merely promotes the demonisation of the Russian president.

Whoever disagrees with us
is waging covert warfare

In its German programming of 8 June, the Russian broadcaster RT, formerly Russia Today, extensively reproduced, with commentary, the information provided by Russian child protection authorities.¹¹ This channel has been banned by the EU. Anyone who broadcasts or disseminates it faces heavy fines, because every statement by the enemy is portrayed as a propaganda lie in “cognitive warfare”. Today, the rule in Brussels is: Whoever disagrees with us is waging covert warfare. The new media law, the Digital Services Act, the EU passed on 17 February 2024, de facto allows Brussels to delete and ban anything that could question its own truths.
  According to RT, the Russian authorities for refugees and child protection have published the following figures: In 2022, the first year of the war, approximately four million Ukrainian residents fled to Russia, including 730,000 children. They were registered in Russian databases. The vast majority of these minors came to Russia with legal representatives: parents, guardians, and tutors. The report continues:
  “Some of the young children came from institutions (orphans, disabled people), including state-run social homes. Due to their vulnerability amid hostilities in 2022, they were evacuated to Russia by aid workers from Donbas and the Russian military – approximately 2,000 children – and were placed in children’s homes. Injured and traumatised children were treated in Russian care facilities or rehabilitation clinics.
  At the same time, 380 children were placed in Russian foster families (with no adoption procedure) until their family situation was resolved.”

Russia’s cooperation with
international aid organisations

According to their statements, the Russian authorities are cooperating with Kyiv government’s aid organisations to return children to their distant or missing parents. The government of Qatar, in cooperation with Moscow, is financing most of the necessary logistics. The ICRC and UN organisations are involved. However, this cannot be publicly mentioned on the Ukrainian side, because then the image of “Kidnapper Putin” might vanish into thin air. But the inconsistencies and contradictions within the narrative of the “Russian child abductor” can no longer be concealed.
  For example, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, one of the leading organisations among hundreds of Western NGOs working to uncover Russian crimes, has published that, of 19,000 “abducted” children, 1,366 have been located and returned to Ukraine. Similar figures are presented by Yuri Vitrenko,¹² who has served since February as the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN and to the OSCE in Vienna.
  What is deliberately omitted is the fact that these returns would be impossible without the Russian authorities’ cooperation. Or what should we imagine? That Ukrainian child welfare commandos invaded Russian foster homes to bring children back across the border under cover of darkness?

‘Children’ as a PR tool

The evacuation of children was rarely a purely humanitarian act, but rather a matter of public relations during the Cold War. Operation Babylift in Vietnam was intended to show the world and the South Vietnamese allies that the United States would not let the offspring of its friends fall into the hands of the communists and that it offered the young Vietnamese children a better life in the free West.
  The PR agency Hill & Knowlton gained international notoriety through the false testimony of a 15-year-old girl named Stagiaire Nayirah, volunteering in a hospital in Kuweit, who, in October 1990, testified before the US Congress that she had seen with her own eyes how Iraqi soldiers ripped out the tubes from incubator babies and left them “to die on the cold floor” (www.youtube.com/watch). This highly emotional, thoroughly fake story was the masterpiece of a PR campaign that led the US Congress to greenlight US entry into the war. The management of Hill & Knowlton, to be noted, was closely intertwined with the government in Washington. The false story spread rapidly in media outlets around the globe.

‘Operation Peter Pan’

Many aid organisations have allowed themselves to be harnessed, with the business model of charity donations, to the political chariot of the Cold Warriors. A classic precedent is “Operation Peter Pan”.¹³ From 1960 to 1962, more than 14,000 minors were flown from Cuba to the United States. The secret flights were called “Freedom Flights”. Father Bryan O. Walsh of the Catholic Welfare Bureau,¹⁴ a Catholic Church organisation in the US specialising in refugee aid, was in charge of this operation.  Anti-Castro newspapers such as the “Miami Herald” and the CIA-controlled Radio Swan spread rumors¹⁵ that Fidel Castro wanted to take these children away from their parents and send them to re-education camps in the Soviet Union.
  The allegations were completely unfounded. It was true that the Communist government in Havana had nationalised the school system, including private schools, and had the curricula redesigned according to “anti-imperialist doctrine”. But even Castro’s critics had to admit that within a few years, Cuba had achieved the highest literacy rate in Latin America.
  However, there were many Cuban families who were on the verge of leaving Cuba. They were persuaded that their children needed to be brought to safety and released them for departure. “A better life” beckoned in Miami. At the end of 1960, President Eisenhower approved 1 million dollars to support “Operation Peter Pan”. Since the Cuban government had nationalised industry and initiated large-scale expropriations, well-off Cubans had left the island en masse. “Operation Peter Pan” was only a small element in a relentless media war the United States waged against Cuba at the time.
  A psychologist in the Swiss army, once stated with regard to war propaganda that it takes about three to four years to persuade a population of the necessity of war. No war can be waged in the long term without the majority consent of the population. However, since this consent would be almost impossible to obtain if people were told the complicated truth – namely, that foreign policy is essentially determined by the energy companies, the arms manufacturers, the military, the “monetary guardians”, and other interest groups – another, more easily understood, reason for war must be provided.
  An enemy who threatens the country and can be portrayed as fiendish and diabolical has always been the best propaganda argument. If Putin is a criminal who has Ukrainian children kidnapped to “erase their identity” in reform camps, this will convince many people that rearmament and war against Russia are the only solution.
  Anyone who succeeds in making people believe that the enemy commits violence against children has achieved the perception of this enemy as a bestial monster. With an enemy so devoid of humanity, there can be no understanding, no peace negotiations, no mercy. Anyone who wants to make a population “bellicose” is bound to portray the enemy as a monster. •

¹ https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/vietnamkrieg-a-948914.html  of 6 August 2007
² https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/27/us/afghan-children-evacuated-without-parents-cec of 27  December 2025
³ https://www.nzz.ch/gesellschaft/russland-verschleppte-gezielt-ukrainische-kinder-ld.1778113of 28 October 2023
⁴ https://globalchildren.georgetown.edu/posts/russia-is-turning-abducted-ukrainian-children-into-soldiersof 17 June 2025
⁵ https://globalbridge.ch/kinderfaenger-putin-ein-lehrstueck-ueber-fakten-chirurgie/ of 6 November 2023
⁶ https://www.amnesty.de/tag/deportation of 10 September 2024
⁷ https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-andof 17 March 2023
⁸ https://www.dw.com/de/ukraine-aktuell-eu-will-entf%C3%BChrte-kinder-suchen/a-65100955 of 24 March 2025
⁹ https://www.unhcr.org/de/news/press-releases/unbegleitete-minderjaehrige-auf-der-flucht-vor-dem-eskalierenden-konflikt-derof 7 March 2022
¹⁰ https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/ukraine-istgh-100.html of 21 August 2024
¹¹ https://de.rt.com/russland/247135-in-russland-verschwunden-russland-katar/ of 8 June 2025
¹² https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000264837/osze-botschafter-internationale-sicherheitsarchitektur-heutzutage-fast-nutzlos from 10 April 2025
¹³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Peter_Pan
¹⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholic_Welfare_Council
¹⁵ https://www.berichteaushavanna.de/2017/10/08/operation-peter-pan-das-eingreifen-der-cia-in-das-leben-von-14000-kubanischen-kindern/of 8 October 2017

First published on globalbridge.ch of 26 July 2025

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Helmut Scheben was a wire service reporter and news media correspondent in Mexico and Central America from 1980 to 1985. In  1986 he became editor of the weekly newspaper WoZ in Zürich; from 1993 to 2012 he was an editor and reporter for Swiss television, SRF, and for 16 of those years he was with  Tagesschau.