Tag Archives: war crimes

Why Putin’s arrest warrant matters

By Jack Wilkin | Tue 28th March 2023 - 5:11 pm

In May 2022 Putin issued a new decree to make it easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children. In addition, Russian officials announced it would extend government support to Russian families who adopt kidnapped Ukrainian children resulting in more than 16,000 being deported to Russia. The abducted children are forced to learn Russian, are denied contact with their families to “Russify” them by providing “patriotic education” and is considered an act of Genocide.

Although some children are being taken from orphanages, many have parents who were coerced into allowing their children to go and others were simply murdered. Daria Gerasimchuk, a Ukrainian government ombudswoman, told the Observer: “They kill the parents, for whatever reason, and kidnap the child. In other cases, they just grab the child directly from the family, perhaps to punish that family.” Such reports are similar to the Canadian Residential Schools and the Nazi Lebensborn program.

Opinion: Justice for war crimes – whose justice?

By Tim Symonds | Sun 7th November 2010 - 11:41 am

From the moment in 1999 when Kosovo with its mass burials and brutal imagery shocked the world – especially Europe, which had not had a war on its soil since the defeat of Hitler – the term ‘War Crimes’ has come back into the lexicon with a vengeance.

Until then, the words brought to mind the Japanese in Manchuria and Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but hardly anything closer in time.

Conflict in the Balkans brought with it a whole new dimension of war. Ugly new phrases like ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ appeared. Albanian Kosovar civilians, especially women, became …