Rash: 20,000 kids have been abducted from Ukraine. These Midwest senators want to find them.

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The June 5 domestic news narrative was dominated by a juvenile online fight between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Overlooked that day, however, was an analogy about children Trump used to explain Ukraine and Russia to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“Sometimes,” Trump said amid an Oval Office meeting, “you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try to pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”

Children are indeed central to the tragedy in Ukraine. But it’s not a playground scuffle. It’s a killing field, with Russia indiscriminately killing and maiming more than 2,700 Ukrainian kids since its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to UNICEF. And it’s not abating: April’s carnage — 19 kids killed and 78 injured — was the worse month since June 2022, and on June 18 Russia struck multiple cities in its biggest attack this year.

Since 2022, more than 1,700 educational institutions have been destroyed or damaged, resulting in a third of the country’s kids losing years of schooling. And beyond the threat of drone and missile strikes are mines and explosive remnants of war, which UNICEF says are “a direct threat to children’s lives and impacts access to schools and services children rely on, as well as livelihoods and reconstruction efforts.”

Overall, there are 3.7 million Ukrainians internally displaced and 6.9 million displaced in a diaspora that includes a cohort in Minnesota. The number of children remaining in Ukraine is estimated to be 5 million, down from a prewar total of 7.3 million.

Among the worst of the numbing numbers is 20,000: the estimate of Ukrainian kids abducted by Russia, which often erases not just their family bonds but their national identity.

Tracking them is essential to the hope of ending this war crime. So it’s essential that the Senate pass the Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by two Midwestern senators — Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican — that would, among other provisions, “increase support for Ukraine’s efforts to investigate and track the nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children who have been abducted during Putin’s brutal invasion, assist with the rehabilitation and reintegration of children who are returned, and provide justice and accountability for perpetrators of these abductions.”

The “mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children is an atrocity, and we really can’t be in a world where kids can be abducted during wartime and then they use it as hostage-taking,” Klobuchar said in an interview.

Kidnapping kids only adds to the tragic impact on childhood in Ukraine, said Toby Fricker, UNICEF Ukraine’s chief of advocacy and communication.

Speaking from besieged Kyiv, Fricker said that “every part of their childhood has been impacted by the war, from losing friends, from youth losing relatives. We did a survey that showed one in five had lost a family member or close friend during the war.” That “sense of security, stability, is just not there, and children are really longing for that peace. And let’s not forget that children in the east of the country have lived through 11 years of war since 2014.”

But beyond the annexed Ukrainian regions, Fricker said that “there is nowhere fully safe in Ukraine today.”

Including Rivne, in central Ukraine, home to Svitlana Zasiekina, her husband and three daughters aged 12, 10 and 7. While Rivne isn’t on the front line or front pages, it’s been attacked, said Zasiekina, who described air-raid alarms sending schoolchildren and university students, including the ones she teaches, to bomb shelters.

“We try to stay positive, we try to live our lives, we try to help each other, we try to help our soldiers,” said Zasiekina, who gave accounts of her kids’ fundraising efforts for soldiers and civilians displaced from the east. “Charity is such a big part now of our lives that it’s inevitable,” she said, adding that even when she’s exhausted, her children motivate their mother. “There is no laziness in taking part in charitable things.”

Indeed, no indolence. But an intensity of ever-present emotion, evident in Zasiekina’s voice when asked about Ukraine’s stolen children.

“There are no material things that we can talk about here; it’s more emotional, right?” she said. “It’s not how it has to be in the civilized world; it’s just not fair.” We “need this feeling of justice.”

Not only do they not have that feeling, many in Ukraine feel “very much damaged and hopeless,” said Iryna Petrus, a Ukrainian living in Minnesota in part to protect her 8-year-old daughter.

The Klobuchar-Grassley bill could help pursue such justice by authorizing the departments of Justice, State and Homeland Security to provide technical assistance, training and capacity to Ukraine, including the continued use of key tools like geospatial intelligence access as well as coordination with nongovernmental organizations and federal agencies to ensure a cohesive federal approach to augmenting Ukraine’s efforts to recover its kids.

“What children need in Ukraine and anywhere is that sort of safety and protecting and nurturing care that they get from family life,” said UNICEF’s Fricker. “When children are affected by war, when their families are ripped apart and affected, that has a massive, massive impact on their well-being.”

As for Trump’s metaphor to Merz, Zasiekina said that “this is a very bad analogy, because it is not about hate; it’s not that we hate the Russians. Because they attacked us, right?”

And the two sides, she said, “aren’t equal to Russia; we don’t have this potential.”

The West, led by the U.S., does have the potential to equal Russia and should continue use it to aid Ukraine in its unequal, existential battle against Russian revanchism. And, just as profoundly, the U.S. has the potential to continue to help Ukrainian families recover their abducted children, which should make Klobuchar’s and Grassley’s bill a bipartisan priority.

Regarding support for the war, Petrus, long-term care program manager at the Ukrainian American Community Center in Minneapolis, acknowledged that “every single person has their own position, but every human being has to understand that supporting kids is the number one priority, because they are kids — full stop.”