September 19, 2026:
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has kidnapped nearly 50,000 Ukrainian children and sent them to Russia to halt its population decline. By 2026, Russia had lost half a million men killed in Ukraine. Another half million were disabled. The kidnapped Ukrainian children were placed with families with no children to be raised as Russians. These children were to become Russian citizens, which included issuing them a Russian passport. Younger children were put up for adoption by Russian families or placed in foster homes if no family was available to accept them.
The Russian government developed a formal system to obtain children. The easiest method was to find young, orphaned children, from infants to 7 or 8 years old, and send them to Russia to be adopted. When Russian troops took some populated Ukrainian territory, special filtration teams were sent in to find any children they could kidnap without meeting violent resistance from families or neighbors.
There was another aspect of this when it came to Ukrainians in Russia-controlled territory supporting and often joining the partisan forces. Many Ukrainians there prefer to move, at least temporarily, to Ukrainian territory. There it is safer, and you can join the Ukrainian military or leave the country. Russia blocks this and comes up with mostly unsuccessful ways to prevent the increasingly troublesome Ukrainians from getting out of Russian-controlled territory. Russia has long handled this problem by moving troublesome civilians to remote parts of Russia. For a long time, this meant exile in Siberia. Moving many troublesome civilians to Siberia is expensive, and in the age of the Internet it often doesn't work as well as it once did.
The Russians have come up with a new oppression technique of taking thousands of Ukrainian children and finding Russian couples that will adopt them. They pay a small fee to the adoptive families. This violates international agreements and is, in fact, a war crime. It wouldn’t be the first such violation by the Russians in Ukraine.
This is in addition to forcing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, many of them children, in Russian-occupied Ukraine into camps and controlled localities all over Russia’s vast territory, generally areas far less pleasant than Ukraine. Russia has done so to troublesome minorities for the past several hundred years.
What is most unusual about this use of children as hostages to pacify occupied regions is that it is happening in Donbas, which has been under Russian control since 2014 and initially supplied troops for the 2022 invasion. As that invasion went badly and got a lot of the Russian soldiers killed or wounded, the surviving volunteers from Donbas refused to fight any longer. Worse, internal security forces in Donbas, recruited from Donbas citizens, quit because Russia was demanding harsher measures against Donbas residents expressing animosity towards Russian control of the area. Russia had to bring in security personnel from Russia to police Donbas.
Most other Russian efforts to diminish Ukrainian resistance in occupied territories are equally dubious when it comes to international law. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin used children as hostages to assure loyalty and good behavior by subordinates and potential opponents. In the kinder and gentler 21st century, child hostages are used to persuade parents to behave while under Russian rule. That did not have the desired effect.