When it comes to Russia it seems many journalists believe that “the end justifies the means” and they can tell any lies they want if it makes Russia out to be the “bad guy”. This is a story about “military” training camps which Ukrainian children in the occupied territories (Ukrainian phraseology) are “sent” to. In reality, the lead character, a girl called “Sonya”, in the story was not “sent” in the sense indicated by the article, that is by Russian authorities. Her parents sent her. And she came back.
The headline for this piece is: “How Russia is grooming Ukraine’s children to fight for it: ‘I understood it wasn’t just play’”. The author is a Liz Cookman, who is described as a “freelance journalist based in Turkey”. (The Guardian is still calling Türkiye Turkey). Liz Cookman was not paying attention in that class at journalism school when they told you to be accurate and check your sources. Nor was she paying attention when they told her to investigate both sides of the story. A simple coda that Russia denies large-scale transfers of children is hardly “balance”. For this story Liz Cookman seems to have consulted various anti-Russian propaganda operations including Globesec, a NATO linked think-tank based in Slovakia with an office in Kiev*, [1] and an academic at Yale involved in “documenting human rights abuses across Ukraine” whose department has recently published a paper “Fact Sheet: Russia’s Kidnapping and Re-education of Ukraine’s Children”. I suspect the main idea for the story and the contact with “Sonya” was probably fed to her by a Kiev regime linked organisation. Indeed the Ukrainian charity “Save the Children” is mentioned. The story line about Russia “abducting children” is terrific propaganda of course. (Recall babies stolen from Kuwait incubators?; it even has echoes of antisemitic stories about Jews stealing Christian babies in the medieval ages). This is par for the course in Western journalism about the Ukraine war and relations with Russia. They do consult a few sources for the article but, almost invariably, the sources are just such a mix of Kiev regime linked operations and NATO linked Western think tanks. This is not journalism. It is propaganda. There is no attempt to reach out to Russian sources even though such sources are available for comment.
The main point to make about the “abducted children” story is that the “abducted” children generally come from regions under Russian control, regions which Russia has incorporated into their system. From the Russian point of view, therefore, these children are not “abducted” or “kidnapped” at all – even if they are transferred to Russia proper. As well as being a tussle over children, this is in fact, a political tussle over territory, or over who controls the population in that territory. “Russia has kidnapped children from Eastern Ukraine” reinforces the idea that Eastern Ukraine is Ukrainian and is thus a political statement about the war, not just a neutral point about missing children. When you look into the story of “thousands of abducted children” it falls apart. Even this story is actually evidence against that narrative. “Sonya” was sent, with her brother, to this camp, by their parents. Both returned home. She didn’t like it. He did. Other cases of alleged “kidnappings” concern children who were in orphanages in territory now controlled by Russia, who have been absorbed into the Russian system. Even Western reporting shows that it is possible, if a real relative can be found, to return these children and that Russian authorities cooperate on these returns. I am not naïve; Russian bureaucracy can be a nightmare and lower level officials may well be totally unable to be pragmatic and recognise the complexities of governing a disputed territory. But; if so, that is the story – not “child-snatching” á la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, (as the totally partisan Yale report mentioned above seeks to portray the situation). Part of the trick in the Western propaganda narrative is to mix up the various cases, especially the issue of children who were in state care in Donbas who are now part of the Russian system, with the case of children sent by the parents to camps, as well as cases, especially earlier on in the war, when children just ended up on the wrong side of the frontlines.
Anyway – the specific piece of propaganda, or separately bad journalism, I suspect the latter, which Liz Cookman provides is this; she includes a photograph of a poster allegedly seen at a camp for teenagers in Russia. It shows a list of rules. The poster is captioned: “A flyer showing the rules at the Russian military camps, including not speaking a foreign language”. The text says: “Camp rules circulating on social media suggest children are banned from speaking ‘foreign’ languages, such as Ukrainian, and from wearing the yellow and blue colours of Ukraine’s flag”. Let’s look more closely at this poster, (and assume it is from a camp). Does it really show that there is a rule at the camp banning “foreign languages”. In fact, it turns out not. The headline of the poster translates to “Rules for safe behaviour during the patriotic shift”. The rules are all about how to behave around soldiers or “heroes” who are acting as camp counsellors. Don’t creep up behind them, don’t make sudden and unexpected gestures, don’t wear blue – in combination with yellow; it can remind them of the uniform (of the enemy presumably), if they shout don’t bicker with them, wait for their anger to pass, and “don’t speak foreign languages near them”. (рядом means nearby). So; it looks like this poster concerns a set of sensible, even caring, rules about not provoking no doubt traumatised soldiers, such as not speaking foreign languages “near” them, (not, not at all). I also wondered how to translate смена – this could refer to the camp as a whole, or to a session during the camp; let’s say it applies to the camp as a whole; even so it does not show “the rules at the Russian military camps, including not speaking a foreign language”. That is propaganda. there is no context and it is a mistranslation. I would speculate that this is how it was presented to Liz Cookman by the outfit in Kiev – or she just downloaded it from Facebook herself, and, in either case she is a bad enough journalist not to have checked.
Had Liz Cookman wanted to write a “balanced” story she could have got a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry. This is a press release on the question. [2] This statement directly refutes the claim by the Yale academic’s department that Russia has refused to provide a list of Ukrainian children. [3]
Liz Cookman, like thousands of other Western “journalists” is just producing what the editors want – so she can, presumably, collect her pay check. It is a formulaic reproduction of propaganda narratives using wholly partisan sources as referents. It isn’t anything to do with journalism.
* Globsec’s website makes it quite hard to find who funds them. But in a downloadable PDF one can find out that they are funded by government, corporates, “NGOS” (often an arms-length governmental funding mechanism in my experience), and a large 20% from the “defence” sector. [1] And, in an appendix, we can find the usual culprits, such as the UK’s Foreign Office, Open Society Foundation, Marshall Centre (US -German military collaboration), European Commission, Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin and so on. (Ok. I did cherry pick some of the most familiar names). [1] There are also plenty of pictures showing links with NATO and one of their recent papers is titled “How to beat Russia”. So “independent” in a rather special sense.
Notes
- https://www.globsec.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/GLOBSEC%20Transparency%20Report%202023.pdf
- https://myanmar.mid.ru/ru/press-centre/news/information_on_the_situation_with_the_so_called_deportation_of_ukrainian_children_to_russia/
- https://medicine.yale.edu/lab/khoshnood/news-article/fact-sheet-russias-kidnapping-and-re-education-of-ukraines-children/