PBS "Frontline," April 16, 2024: "Children of Ukraine" (GBH Educational Foundation, WGBH, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the third and last part of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, PBS showed a new episode of its long-running Frontline documentary series called “Children of Ukraine,” about how up to 150,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken out of Ukraine into Russia. There they’re sent into “camps” and essentially brainwashed into denying or forgetting their former identity as Ukrainians and accepting a new one as Russians, including being forced to sing patriotic songs about Russia and ultimately being adopted by Russian families. “Basically, they try to erase our identity as Ukrainians,” said one of the parents of these children. “They try to impose their distorted version of history. We're still hoping to bring them back home. They are still our children.” Some of the “children” involved are actually teenage boys who are worrying that they may soon be drafted in the Russian Army and forced to fight against their countrymen. “Russia has said it's been relocating Ukrainian children as part of a mass humanitarian effort,” said Frontline’s familiar narrator, Will Lyman. “A year into the war, President Vladimir Putin held a televised rally featuring children thanking Russian soldiers for rescuing them. … In a statement, the Russian government told us that Ukrainian children have been relocated to ensure their safety and to provide medical care and education.” The relocation effort to move Ukrainian children to Russia is under the direction of Maria Lvova-Belova, who’s shown in the documentary. She says she has adopted five children herself, including one from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was gutted and essentially destroyed by Russian attacks.

The “Children of Ukraine” documentary opens with a scene at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands in which arrest warrants were sworn out against Lvova-Belova and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges the Russian government called “outrageous.” “A team of Ukrainian investigators is now collecting evidence they are hoping will be used for the International Criminal Court case,” Lyman explained. “They work for a human rights group, the IPHR [International Partnership for Human Rights], and are traveling through recently liberated territories across Ukraine.” IPHR’s Web site is https://iphronline.org, and though they claim to have “cooperated with civil society groups in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus,” virtually all the Web tabs linked to on IPHR’s home page are for sites in the former Soviet Union. “Our mission is to find families whose children are missing till this day,” an IPHR spokesperson told Frontline. “And we're trying to collect all the evidence and information about such cases so that our lawyers could qualify it after, whether it was a war crime or a crime against humanity.” They’re shown in the documentary working with another group called Save Ukraine (https://www.saveukraineua.org), and their Web page includes a link to a CBS-TV 60 Minutes story from November 19, 2023, also about the alleged abductions of Ukrainian children and their indoctrination into Russian identity and culture before they’re adopted by Russian parents (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukrainians-accuse-russia-of-abducting-indoctrinating-children-60-minutes-transcript/).

One of the cases shown in the documentary is Maxim, a four-year-old boy whose grandmother tried to place him with older relatives after his mom was killed in a Russian attack on their car. Maxim’s mother was killed in the assault, but his two older siblings – a brother and a sister – survived. But Maxim was taken and later his surviving relatives saw a photo of someone who looked like him in a Russian catalog of young children available for adoption. A teenage boy named Arkem had a particularly harrowing experience in Russian custody, According to the show, he was taken to the Perevalsk Special Correctional Boarding School in Luhansk, a Russian-controlled area of eastern Ukraine. There his cell phone was confiscated so he couldn’t call his parents and tell them where he was, and he was forced to sing the Russian national anthem and wear uniforms with the letter “Z,” a symbol of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “The Russian government said in its statement that Artem and his fellow students had been relocated to protect them from Ukrainian shelling, and that Russia had tried to contact the children’s families,” narrator Lyman explained. “They said it’s ‘hardly surprising’ that a Russian school would have ‘due regard for national symbols, including the country's flag and anthem.’” Six months after he was captured, Artem – who in the meantime was scared he would be drafted into Russia’s military and forced to fight against his fellow Ukrainians – was reunited with his mother after she took a long, circuitous journey through Poland and Belarus before finally rendezvousing with her son in Crimea in Russian-occupied south Ukraine.

Among the ironies of this show was the sheer number of people in it who were wearing T-shirts with English logos and other writing, including the sporting-goods maker The North Face; and the fact that the U.S. and Canada did something similar in the 1890’s and for decades afterwards. After major Native American resistance to U.S. occupation ended with the December 29, 1890 Native defeat at the battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. government adopted a policy called “forced assimilation.” Native children were rounded up and sent to special “Indian schools” where they were forcibly indoctrinated into the ways of white American culture and, like the Ukrainian children held hostage by Russians, were punished severely if they spoke their native language or tried to hold on to their people’s traditional customs. In another PBS documentary (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/buffy-saintemarie-carry-it-on-eagle.html), Canadian Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie recalled being subjected to this abuse, including being kidnapped from her parents and adopted by a white family where she was subjected to physical, including sexual, abuse that lasted until she was old enough to go to college. The stated rationale behind this program was to “kill the Indian to save the man.”