The Children Of Ukraine

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The musician Sting has an anti-war song from the mid-1980s Cold War, “Russians,” with the lyric, “I wonder if the Russians love their children too.” Of course, they do.

But one of my earliest memories in Ukraine, when I first visited in 2012, was of a working father joining his wife and toddler for a jaunt in a park at lunchtime. Perhaps it was the jetlag, but even then, I was moved by such emotion. and joy exhibited by this simple everyday occurrence.

You can tell a lot about a country’s society by how they treat their pets and their children. Pets and children are revered in Ukraine. Perhaps because they represent hope and unconditional love, but I feel this connection with the vulnerable even more in wartime.

Children are always the biggest victims of war. The trauma will last them a lifetime, meaning the tragedy of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine will reverberate for generations to come.

From the Central Park of Culture and Recreation, where children were still playing near bombed-out carousel rides and statues with mortar wounds, to the “Dead Children’s Memorial” in Kharkiv (what a horrific thing to have to commemorate), to helping refugees fleeing to Odesa from Kherson flooding (thanks to the Kakhovka Dam eco-terror event perpetrated by Russia); to visiting the children of Lada’s orphanage, where over a dozen children are now without parents or a primary caregiver, I saw numerous examples of children’s suffering.

It is clear this war, with almost 1,000 Ukrainian children murdered as of this writing so far (compared to ZERO Russian children), has taken a horrific toll thus far and growing daily.

Murdered, orphaned, traumatized children are just part of the story. As of this writing, an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 children have been kidnapped by Russia and whisked off to re-education camps in Russia, taught to hate their ancestral land. This is another war crime.

Clearly, in Putin’s Russia, children are not revered, cared for, and loved but are to be exploited, weaponized as tools of war, or, in some cases, simply murdered. These children are not statistics or “collateral damage. ” They are flesh and blood. The irony is that many U.S. lawmakers in the “pro-life” camp consistently try to deny U.S. aid to Ukraine. They don’t do this in a vacuum, I assume. They do this because their “pro-life” constituents are telling them they don’t want to spend the money to support Ukraine. These people who say they support Israel don’t believe in supporting Ukraine (Rand Paul), as if one child’s life is more valuable than another.

What about a Palestinian child? As Israel exacts revenge on all of Gaza for Hamas’ horrific terror (which also claimed innocent children’s lives – but these are, after all, terrorists, not supposedly civilized countries), one must ask, what is a Palestinian child’s life worth?

The hypocrisy of the past few weeks and months is not only mind-numbing but demoralizing. It feels like the cynicism of Russia has seeped into our country of hope and freedom and that we are suddenly unable to distinguish between the simple difference between right and wrong, good and evil.

When did hope and freedom and doing the right thing become partisan issues? I suspect that it was when social media became so prevalent in our lives and our exposure to Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and North Korean propaganda.

These are little innocent human beings with flesh and blood, loved and lovable, targeted by a brutal tyrant. These are war crimes and must not be normalized. This is unacceptable, and anyone who stands in the way of ending Putin’s war crimes on these tiny little beings is just as guilty as Putin is.

True “pro-life” is ending this brutal war by giving Ukraine all the aid it needs, both military and humanitarian, so that Putin will not only leave Ukraine but will never perpetrate these horrific war crimes ever again on little souls.

Click here to tell your senator or congressperson to continue aiding Ukraine and, in turn, stop the murder, maiming, kidnapping, displacement, and trauma of Ukraine’s most vulnerable little citizens.