Nina Nazarova & Svyatoslav Khomenko “Stolen Childhoods”

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

They know that there are bad times when children become a little too important. When they don’t exist simply because someone longed for them, but become a matter of the nation and its future. When suddenly more children are needed, and the right ones.

By the time the Kremlin began spreading the message that they needed to “rescue orphans from Ukraine,” more than 30,000 Russian children were already living in homes. They obviously didn’t need saving. The figure is one of many in the reportage volume “Stolen Childhoods,” in which journalists Nina Nazarova and Svyatoslav Khomenko describe the illegal deportations of Ukrainian children to Russian territory.

Through four typical cases gives the reader insight into a nightmare that increasingly appears to be central to Russian warfare, but which has received relatively little attention.

We meet an orphaned teenager who is brought from Donetsk to Russia. Here the deportations began a few days before the large-scale invasion, and this knowledge has something to do with the historiography around February 24, 2022. The war crimes were already underway.

A girl accidentally ends up on the wrong side of the front and has to start a Russian school. When the bombs begin to fall, six children from a family home are on a seaside vacation in Mariupol, while the adults stay in the small town of Vuhledar, ten miles away. A place that no longer exists. In the fourth case, a family under constant fire agrees to send their son to a sanatorium in the Russian city of Krasnodar, only to soon realize that he is not coming back. The fact that the crazy idea of ​​sending your child to an enemy country was even possible says something about what war is. And why would they…want to steal our children?

Ultimately, of course, the crimes against children are about denying through concrete acts that Ukraine even exists

That’s not one Book for those who want to deeply understand the twisted logic behind Russia’s abductions of Ukrainian children, even if it is palpable. When Russian children’s rights representative Maria Lvova-Belova, who is now internationally wanted, speaks in a gentle voice of having rescued “orphans from the liberated areas,” it becomes clear that the overarching goal is to erase the line between truth and lies.

Ultimately, of course, the crimes against children are about denying through concrete acts that Ukraine even exists. But also about stocking up on new canonical foods in a Russia where the population is capsizing.

This is an analysis that takes place between the lines, because Stolen Childhoods is a report in which most of what happens is in close-up. Someone is riding the bus, someone’s grandmother is trying to certify a document, someone is standing in a school and has to write a nice greeting to a Russian soldier – all interwoven with dry facts, figures and information about political decisions from Moscow. Detail after detail and no overview.

Stylistically it is a bit flat and the saturated effect is reinforced by the many cut-up quotes sprinkled in. Sometimes I wish the writers had let people speak in full sentences more. At the same time, the form may reflect the nature of war – chaotic, bleak and without clear direction.

There are also moments when a brutal drama ends more or less happily

In devastating terms shows how Russian soldiers, supported by messages from the Kremlin, take children out of bombed-out cities the way one would carry a “washing machine out of an abandoned apartment.” A spoil of war.

There are also moments when a brutal drama ends more or less happily. For example, when the staff of an orphanage outside Kherson begins hiding the little ones with their own families. When the Russians show up with automatic weapons in hand, their first words are: Where are the children?

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