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THE UK has cracked down on Vladimir Putin’s evil squad of child snatchers who have deported and brainwashed thousands of Ukrainian kids.
Acting on the grim 1,000-day milestone of war in Ukraine, the UK government has named, shamed and sanctioned 10 of the sick masterminds behind the kidnapping of children to be tortured and “re-educated”.
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Almost 20,000 Ukrainian children have been swiped, including disabled kids from a special needs school and bundled over the border.
Some 6,000 of the displaced youngsters are thought to be locked in sinister “zombie” camps.
In these hellholes the children, forced to speak Russian, are brainwashed in a three-stage plan to scrub out their Ukrainian identity and replace it with Kremlin propaganda.
They are told their loved ones have abandoned them and that they belong to Russia before having their official documents altered.
Putin's lackeys then drop them into Russian families.
Child-snatching officials sometimes even change the spelling of the children’s names to make rescue attempts more difficult.
One of the schemers sanctioned by the UK, Vitakiy Alejsandrovich Suk, has been harvesting disabled kids by plucking them from the special-needs boarding school he runs.
Also sanctioned is the All-Russian Young Army Military Patriotic Social Movement (Yunarmia), Russia’s hardcore paramilitary youth club, which is central to the snatching programme.
Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, told The Sun last month that kids in these camps who resist their Russian captors are tortured in special rooms.
Thugs force them to spend days in windowless “torture chambers” without food and water until they accept they are Russian citizens and sing the national anthem.
Traumatised kids who made it home have told of beatings in isolation cells and being forced to watch their jailers burn the Ukrainian flag.
The MP also warned that the kids are forced to join Russian military training - part of Putin’s plan to replenish his army and make Ukrainians fight against their own people.
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'I was snatched by a Russian soldier'
ILLIA, 11, was deported from Mariupol after a Russian missile strike killed his mother and left him with horror shrapnel wounds when he was nine.
His neighbours buried his mum's body in their back garden before he was snatched by Vlad's soldiers and taken for surgery at a camp in Donestk.
The shrapnel was removed without any anaesthetic and forced to write and speak Russian and repeat "Glory to Ukraine as part of Russia".
He says Russian forces tried to turn him into a "propaganda tool" but that he is not "one to be duped so easily."
Illia's grandmother had been searching for her grandson ever since losing contact with her daughter in March 2022.
It wasn't until they spotted the young boy in a video from Russia that she realised he was alone and that her daughter had been killed.
His grandmother never gave up hope and set about getting her injured grandson back home where he belonged.
Months later, Illia returned home to Ukraine and had further surgery to remove more fragments from his leg while 11 remain.
His grandmother Olena said: "He had a school, he had a home, he had a mother and he lost all of that - his entire childhood.
"He kept to himself, he was afraid of noise, he was afraid of sirens. He had no memory.
He now has dreams of becoming a doctor so that he can help fighters on the frontline as a combat medic.
Dmytro said that Putin was overseeing a “genocide” of Ukrainian children.
He said: "Children must spend a period in special camps.
“The children have to be in the camps for two weeks, sometimes it is two months."
But this is just the first stage.
The second step involves changing the child’s Ukrainian documents and giving them a new identity.
Dmytro added: "If the child has Ukraine documents, for example a birth certificate or passport, the Russians take away these documents and give Russian documents to the child.
“We see that often the Russians change the information, change the names and date of birth, place of birth."
The final stage is placing the lost child with a Russian family where they continue to be brainwashed.
They are forced to attend Russian school everyday and eventually made to forget their Ukrainian heritage entirely.
A monthly cash bonus is used to incentivise families to accept Ukrainian children.
Of the 20,000 children stolen from Ukraine, at least 555 are feared dead and 1,429 have been injured, according to Dmytro’s Bring Kids Back initiative.
Dmytro said the true numbers could be much higher.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, vowed: “No child should ever be used as a pawn in war.”
He said that Putin’s “targeting of Ukrainian children” shows the awful “depths” he will sink to in his mission to “erase Ukraine and its people from the map”.
He restated the UK’s “iron clad” support for Ukraine against Putin’s illegal invasion.
In 1,000 grim days of war nearly 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been slaughtered and 10 million forced from their homes.
The Russian army has suffered over 700,000 casualties, and announced today that Ukraine had fired US long-range missiles into its territory for the first time.
News of the strike came just hours after Vladimir Putin green-lit a new nuclear doctrine, in retaliation to Ukraine's new missile permissions.
It equated use of the Western weapons by Ukraine with an act of aggression by those allied countries supplying them with weapons.
The Kremlin said it marked the crossing of a red line - officially putting nuclear retaliation on the table.
Named and shamed: List of Putin's child-snatchers sanctioned by UK
BY Patrick Harrington, Foreign News Reporter
The full list of Russian child-snatchers sanctioned by the UK today:
- All-Russian Young Army Military Patriotic Social Movement (Yunarmia)
- Nikita Vladimirovich Nagorny
- Igor Kazarezov
- Andrey Sabinov
- Serafim Vikentevich Ivanov
- Avangard
- Olena Oleksandrivna Shapurova
- Valentina Vasilyevna Lavrik
- Tetiana Zavalska
- Vitaliy Aleksandrovich Suk
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English (US) · 