Russia and Noise

Let’s deal first with the Russian way of war and violations of the genocide convention. Here is a genuine violation. The transfer of children is a war crime. Russians don’t care. This is about Russification and a demographic collapse. So this is about one child, one family.

It is also about the well-connected and the erasure of identity. This child is too young to remember where she was born. She will grow up as an excellent Russian citizen. She will likely need to learn what it is to be a Ukrainian. This story is as old as the Russia of the Tsars. And since her origin is also changed in her documents, it’s as if she was never born in Ukraine:

The head of A Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, and his wife secretly adopted a child taken from Ukraine, changing both his name and place of birth in the documents.

At the end of August 2022, Mironov’s wife Inna Varlamova arrived in the Kherson region along with Mironov’s first deputy in the State Duma, Yana Lantratova. They didn’t leave alone. Local occupation authorities issued a power of attorney for them to remove two children from the Kherson orphanage — 10-month-old Margarita Prokopenko and two-year-old Ilya Vashchenko, writes “Important Stories”.

A week after being deported from Ukraine, Margarita and Ilya ended up in the Moscow region. To adopt a child in Russia, you need to apply to the…