We can unearth the mass graves left in Ukraine by retreating Russian troops. We can talk to the Ukrainian survivors of rape and torture, the mothers of fallen soldiers, and the millions who live in constant fear of Russian bombing and terror. But we can’t contact the Ukrainian women and children whom the invaders have abducted and taken far into the interior of Russia. They are the war’s invisible victims — and will remain so even after a truce, whenever it comes.
As of this summer, the Russians had forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians — mainly women — from the Ukrainian territories they occupied, including some 260,000 children. Those numbers have grown since then. Just during the Russian retreat from Kherson, for example, the attackers moved perhaps another 60,000 Ukrainians in less than a week. With their bloodcurdling Orwellian euphemisms, the Russians boast that millions of Ukrainians have “found shelter” or “been adopted” in Russia.
Why women and children, in particular? So that the women will bear “Russian” rather than “Ukrainian” babies in the future, and the children will forget they were ever Ukrainian and become Russian instead. That rhymes with one rationale President Vladimir Putin has given all along for his invasion. In his telling, Ukraine isn’t a country at all, just a region of Russia suffering from the “false consciousness” that it is a nation. It follows that Putin must destroy Ukraine as a culture, polity and people. One way to do that is to move Ukrainians out, and Russians in.
