Rash: Returning Ukraine’s abducted kids isn’t about geopolitics — it’s about justice

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On Sunday, at the Ukrainian American Community Center in Minneapolis, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar took a question from a person she smilingly called a “junior journalist.”

“Why,” wondered 6-year-old Olena Vitvitsky (actually, 6 ¾, Olena told this senior journalist), “are they taking the kids?”

Klobuchar, speaking to a capacity crowd of concerned Ukrainians about her Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill she introduced with Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, responded in a way Olena — and all of us — can understand.

“Well, because there is this horrible war where this man from Russia decided that he was going to invade a country that is not his. As part of that invasion, Ukrainians have stood up and fought back,” Klobuchar told Olena, who was one of several children who attended with their parents.

As part of this horrible war, Klobuchar continued, giving Olena a gentler version than she shared with the adults in the audience, Russia has kidnapped kids from Ukraine — 20,000, according to some estimates — often erasing their national and even family identity.

As Klobuchar explained earlier to the broader audience, her bill “first enhances support for Ukraine’s efforts to investigate and track the abducted children. Two, it helps those kids who make it back home and need support during a difficult transition. And three, it reinforces efforts to hold those who commit these crimes accountable. In Ukraine, prosecutors have opened up tens of thousands of war-crimes cases. They need sustained support from us and our allies, so before any peace is finalized, every child will be returned.

“These kids are literally prisoners of war. They weren’t soldiers. They were just little kids. They must not be pawns in the negotiation, because this isn’t just about politics. It’s about moral clarity and basic humanity.”

Those virtues were ascribed to the senator herself from one of the local leaders of the Ukrainian community flanking the senator. Maria Doan, the Minnesota branch president of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, thanked Klobuchar for her “moral clarity, courage and unwavering support for Ukraine.”

Klobuchar said that “Russia has targeted orphanages and vulnerable kids who may not be accounted for because it is very, very difficult to trace everyone in the middle of a war. As researchers at Yale have documented, this is a deliberate, coordinated program directed and run by the Russian government.” Ukrainian kids, she said, were being sent to more than 20 regions across Russia, from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Russia, said Doan, “is carrying out a systematic, state-sponsored campaign to abduct Ukrainian children. This is not a consequence of war — it is a war crime.”

That’s the charge Russian President Vladimir Putin and an associate were indicted on by the International Criminal Court.

Klobuchar’s bill, Doan said, “is not about geopolitics — it’s about children. It’s about justice. And it sends a clear message: We will not look away.”

Looking — or staring, stunned by their fate — was the reaction Iryna Borbol, a refugee and family educational mentor at the center, recalled of those children. In emotive terms that appeared to choke up some of the stoic Ukrainians, Borbol offered this unflinching account:

“I am a mother. A Ukrainian. A family mentor. I work with families who fled Russian-occupied territories. I have seen what this war has done to children. Children who were told their language didn’t exist. That their identity didn’t matter. That they were nothing. But they are not nothing. They are survivors.”

Borbol, from Rivne in Western Ukraine, recalled volunteering to help children fleeing the east during freezing February weather. “Many had no parents with them. Some were left behind. Some had no one left. They didn’t cry. They didn’t scream. They just stared. Eyes wide. Eyes empty. Eyes broken.”

She also told of aiding an orphaned girl from Mariupol, scene of a siege that reflected Russia’s depravity and Ukraine’s defiance. Mariupol is also the hometown of Alex Ashikhmin, a 15-year-old boy who attended the senator’s address. When he was 12, he told me, he was “hit from an aircraft from a small bomb.” (The kind, along with drones, that ever-increasingly indiscriminately kill and maim nightly in Ukraine, acts that should also be charged as war crimes.) “I got a very big wound on the back of my knee. There was a lot of blood, and the doctor said on the way to be alive they had to cut my leg off.”

He came to Minnesota to get a prosthetic leg. Standing straight and strong, Alex said that he was “very grateful and so thankful” for the help he got here, and he expressed his approval and appreciation of Klobuchar’s bill, calling it a “good idea to help save the Ukrainian nation, because the future of Ukraine is young people, born in Ukraine,” where he wants to eventually return.

Many others at the Ukrainian American Community Center and in the broader diaspora dream of returning, too. The prospects for that may have improved on Monday, when President Donald Trump announced in a meeting with the leader of NATO that nations in Europe would be expedited armaments that could then be sent to Ukraine, and that if Moscow didn’t approve a peace pact within 50 days the U.S. would impose even more punishing sanctions on Russia and secondary sanctions on its trading partners.

The scales falling from the president’s eyes regarding the Kremlin is a welcome, albeit late, development. Ideally it will result in a negotiated end, even though Klobuchar acknowledged on Sunday that “it won’t end up exactly as everyone wants, but we don’t think these kids should be part of those negotiations as hostages.”

These kids, Klobuchar said, “deserve to know who they are, where they come from, and that the world didn’t turn away and close its eyes.

“We’re not going to turn away.”

Bringing Ukrainian kids home, Borbol said, “is not a political act. It is not about paperwork. It is not about diplomacy.

“It is a moral duty. It is justice.

“It is giving a child back their name. Their language. Their mother. Their truth.

“Every day we wait a child forgets one more word of Ukrainian. One more memory fades.

“We do not have time. Please — help bring them home.”