“Those Russian ‘kidnappers.’”
Anatomy of a propaganda op.
“The information age is actually a media age,” the late John Pilger once remarked. “We have war by media, censorship by media, demonology by media, retribution by media, diversion by media—a Surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”
I have quoted John to this effect numerous times since he offered these observations. The occasion of his speech was the coup in Kiev the United States cultivated in February 2014. And how right he has since proven. As John also noted at the time, not in his lifetime (and, so, not in mine) have we been subjected to so pervasive an onslaught of media-driven propaganda in the service of another of America’s imperial adventures.
There is propaganda by way of omission, an insidious and highly effective technique, and propaganda by way of disinformation—the less subtle strategy. The Ukraine crisis has precipitated numerous examples of both. In the latter line we have had some notable cases. There was the mass grave outside Mariupol, where the Russians allegedly buried hundreds of civilians but which turned out to be an ordinary cemetery. There was the massacre at Bucha, supposedly conducted by Russian units as they withdrew; that turned out to be the work of Ukrainian soldiers taking revenge against townspeople who did not resist the Russian presence.
With this piece The Floutist begins a two-part series dedicated to exploding various of these lies. Both pieces come to us from German-speaking writers.
In this investigation Helmut Scheben, a Swiss correspondent of long experience, takes on the extended and unfortunately effective propaganda operation concerning the removal of Ukrainian children from war zones after the Russian intervention began in February 2022. In a brilliant bit of lateral thinking, Scheben deploys history to unmask hypocrisy. As he points out, the United States has evacuated thousands of children in every war from Vietnam to Afghanistan, always declaring this a humanitarian mission. When Russia removes orphans from combat zones in Ukraine, an overwhelming Western propaganda apparatus portrays this as child abduction and a crime.
We welcome these pieces as contributions to what will surely prove a long-term project of exposure, and we welcome Helmut Scheben into our pages. We have kept the footnotes Scheben included in his original file.
—The Editors.
Helmut Scheben.
ZÜRICH—According to official figures, the U.S. military transported several thousand children from Vietnam to the United States, ostensibly for the sake of their safety, as the Vietnam war ended in April 1975.1 “Operation Babylift” made headlines at the time because the first plane carrying Vietnamese children crashed near what was then Saigon. Almost half a century later, in December 2021, CNN reported that the U.S. military had brought 1,450 children from Afghanistan to the United States.2 This generated no more political attention than a traffic report or a weather forecast would do.
I do not know how many children the U.S. has displaced in this fashion in all its wars: from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, from the Balkans, from Iraq, Libya, or Syria. According to media reports, the United States evacuated more than 3,000 children from Vietnam alone, and, as in other cases, many pious and other-than-pious Christian aid organisations were involved. No journalist from a major Western newspaper ever thought of referring to all these removals as “child abductions” or “deportations.” Quite the opposite. Protecting the defenceless has always been a precept of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions regulate the protection of civilians, including children, in war.
But this does not apply to Russia. When the Russian army evacuates parentless children and young people from Ukrainian combat zones, this cannot be considered a humanitarian action because Russia, in the person of Vladimir Putin, is devoid of any humanity and compassion. This twisted logic is evidently the basis for the propaganda fictions that have been fabricated by numerous human-rights NGOs and circulated in major Western media since the beginning of the Russian intervention in February 2022.
Most of these nongovernmental organisations are not what their names suggest: They are not independent of government funding and government pressure groups. Many engage in regime-change operations according to the intentions of the West. And this is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. India has revoked the licenses of fully 15,000 NGOs in recent years.
The Russian government’s detailed statements on these allegations of child abduction are either ignored by Western media or condensed into two or three sentences, usually under stock phrases that approximate, “Moscow denies it again.” Russia is largely powerless against a massive Western propaganda machine that is accelerating its campaign for rearmament and conjuring a new war against Russia.
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No sophisticated propaganda technique was needed to fabricate the narratives about the “deportation of Ukrainian children.” The issue is rendered in the simplest terms. Children evacuated by Russian troops from danger zones on the front lines are usually registered as residents in Ukraine. As soon as a territory is occupied by Russian troops, children in that zone can be listed as “disappeared” and declared “abducted.”
There are apparently no limits to narrative creativity when it comes to the “kidnapper Putin,” a phrase I draw from NZZ am Sonntag, the Sunday edition of Neue Zürcher Zeitung.3 At one point after this propaganda operation was under way Mykola Kuleba, the government commissioner for children’s rights in Kiev, told the U.N. Security Council, “More than a million children ended up in the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas and were deported to Moscow. They were stolen and turned into weapons. Thousands of them are now fighting against their homeland.”
This theme—that the Russian government is abducting children from Ukraine to “Russify” them in re-education camps, “erasing their identity,” and then sending them to the front as cannon fodder—is familiar in Western media.4 In our talk shows about Ukraine, we still wait in vain for a psychologist or strategy expert who would ask the sobering question of what military and political benefit the Russian army could derive from such a practice and whether we should trust the Kremlin to deploy such a stupid strategy.
Major newspapers such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, as well as renowned human-rights organisations such as Amnesty International, are nevertheless being misled5 into authenticating the stories of the “Russian child predator.”6 But caution is advised. Amnesty International, for example, has repeatedly been deceived by propaganda lies, as in the case of the “incubator babies” in the first Gulf War, and again in the case of Muammar Gaddafi’s alleged “planned mass murder” in Benghazi, which was used as a pretext for NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign against Libya. Amnesty International has meekly admitted its mistakes and deleted fake stories, but apparently it seems to keep falling into the same trap.
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In March 2023, the International Criminal Court, the I.C.C., issued arrest warrants against President Putin and Maria Lvova–Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.7 The reason given was that there were “justifiable grounds to believe” that both were “individually criminally responsible” for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Ursula von der Leyen, the E.U. Commission’s president, subsequently spoke in Brussels not exactly of a million, as Kuleba had it, but, even so, of 16,200 Ukrainian children allegedly abducted by Russia.
“What is happening there, the deportation of children, is a terrible reminder of the darkest times in our history,” von der Leyen asserted.8 It is clear what is meant when a German politician refers to the darkest times in history. We remember German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who prepared Germans for NATO’s attack against the Serbs in the late–1990s, using the slogan “Auschwitz—never again.”
The I.C.C. has not disclosed the facts on which it based its arrest warrants. U.N. organisations such as UNICEF or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have never confirmed the allegation that Ukrainian children were illegally abducted by Russia. UNHCR states:
Nearly 100,000 children, half of them with disabilities, live in institutional care and boarding schools in Ukraine. Many of these children have living relatives or legal guardians. We have received reports of institutions seeking to move children to safety in neighbouring countries or beyond. We acknowledge that humanitarian evacuations can be life-saving in certain circumstances and welcome efforts to bring children to safety.9
The International Committee of the Red Cross has stated nothing other than that it is working with both Russian and Ukrainian authorities on child-protection and family-reunification programs in Russia and Ukraine.
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It is astonishing, however, to note the legal flexibility the tribunal in The Hague displays to accommodate the government in Kiev. Ukraine joined The Hague court only in 2024. The Zelensky government made it clear at the time that only Russian criminals should be prosecuted. Ukraine does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction over members of the Ukrainian army or its volunteer militias.10 Kiev evidently fears investigations into atrocities allegedly committed by the Ukrainian army and its militias against the population of Donbas since 2014 under the guise of its “Anti–Terrorist Operation.”
The very fact that Ukraine can impose these conditions raises questions about the political independence of the judges in The Hague. What goes on behind the scenes is impossible to know. However, the enormous pressure exerted by Western governments and media is an undeniable fact.
The temptation to give in to this pressure is all the greater when the court’s decisions are inconsequential. Any ruling would be ineffective in this case, as the court lacks the police-related executive power to enforce its decisions against the resistance of major powers. The United States, as well as Russia, China, India, Turkey, Israel, and other states, have not recognised the court, which was established in 1998 under the Rome Statute. The arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin is therefore nothing more than a political symbol. It merely promotes the demonisation of the Russian president.
In its German programming of 8 June, RT, the Russian broadcaster, extensively reproduced, with commentary, the information provided by Russian child-protection authorities.11 This channel has been banned in the E.U. Anyone in Europe who broadcasts or disseminates RT faces heavy fines, because every statement by the enemy is portrayed as a propaganda lie in “cognitive warfare.” Today, the rule in Brussels is: Whoever disagrees with us is waging covert warfare. The Continent’s new media law, the Digital Services Act, which the E.U. passed in October 2022, de facto allows Brussels to delete and ban anything that could question its own truths.
According to RT, the Russian authorities managing refugees and child protection have published the following figures: In 2022, the first year of the war, approximately four million Ukrainian residents fled to Russia, including 730,000 children. They were registered in Russian databases. The vast majority of these minors came to Russia with legal representatives: parents, guardians, and tutors. The report continues:
Some of the young children (orphans, the disabled) came from institutions, including state-run social homes. Due to their vulnerability amid hostilities in 2022, they were evacuated to Russia by aid workers from Donbas and the Russian military—approximately 2,000 children—and were placed in children’s homes. Injured and traumatised children were treated in Russian care facilities or rehabilitation clinics.
At the same time, 380 children were placed in Russian foster families (with no adoption procedure) until their family situation was resolved.
According to their statements, the Russian authorities are cooperating with Kiev government and Ukrainian aid organisations to return children to their distant or missing parents. The government of Qatar, in cooperation with Moscow, is financing most of the necessary logistics. The Red Cross and various U.N. organisations are involved. However, this cannot be publicly mentioned on the Ukrainian side, because then the image of “kidnapper Putin” would no longer hold. But the inconsistencies and contradictions within the narrative of the “Russian child abductor” can no longer be concealed.
For example, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, one of the leading organisations among hundreds of Western NGOs working to uncover Russian crimes, has reported that, of 19,000 “abducted” children, 1,366 have been located and returned to Ukraine. Similar figures are presented by Yuri Vitrenko,12 who has served since February as the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.N. and to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the O.S.C.E, in Vienna.
What is deliberately omitted is the fact that these returns would be impossible without the Russian authorities’ cooperation. Or what should we imagine? That Ukrainian child-welfare commandos invaded Russian foster homes to bring children back across the border under cover of darkness?
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The evacuation of children was rarely a purely humanitarian act during the Cold War. In most cases it was, rather, a matter of public relations. Operation Babylift in Vietnam was intended to show the world and Washington’s South Vietnamese allies that the United States would not let the offspring of its friends fall into the hands of the communists and that it offered young Vietnamese children a better life in the free West.
Hill & Knowlton, the public-relations agency, gained international notoriety through the false testimony of a 15–year-old girl named Nayirah, ostensibly a medical intern, who, in October 1990, testified before the U.S. Congress that she had seen with her own eyes how Iraqi soldiers ripped out the tubes from incubator babies and left them “to die on the cold ground.” This highly emotional, thoroughly fake story was the masterpiece of a P.R. campaign that led Congress to green-light U.S. entry into the war. Hill & Knowlton’s management, to be noted, has long had close relations with the U.S. government. The false story it concocted spread rapidly in media around the globe.
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Over the years, many aid organisations have hitched themselves, via the business model of charity donations, to the Cold Warriors’ wagon. A classic precedent is Operation Peter Pan. From 1960 to 1962, more than 14,000 minors were flown from Cuba to the United States. These secret operations were called “Freedom Flights.” Fr. Bryan O. Walsh of the Catholic Welfare Bureau,13 a Catholic organisation in the U.S. specialising in refugee aid, was in charge of them. Anti–Castro newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the CIA–controlled Radio Swan, which broadcast from islands off the coast of Honduras, spread rumors14 that Fidel Castro wanted to take these children away from their parents and send them to re-education camps in the Soviet Union.
Those allegations were completely unfounded. It was true that the Communist government in Havana had nationalised the school system, including private schools, and had the curricula redesigned according to “anti-imperialist doctrine.” But even Castro’s critics had to admit that, within a few years, Cuba had achieved the highest literacy rate in Latin America.
However, there were many Cuban families who were on the verge of leaving Cuba. They were persuaded that their children needed to be brought to safety and released them for departure. “A better life” beckoned in Miami. At the end of 1960, President Eisenhower approved $1 million to support Operation Peter Pan. Since the Cuban government had nationalised industry and initiated large-scale expropriations, well-off Cubans had left the island en masse. Operation Peter Pan was only a small element in a relentless media war the United States waged against Cuba at the time, which amounted to a preface to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
No war can be waged in the long term without the majority consent of the population. A psychologist serving in the Swiss army once stated with regard to war propaganda that it takes about three to four years to persuade a population of the necessity of a war. However, since this consent would be almost impossible to obtain if people were told the complicated truth—in essence that foreign policy is determined by the energy companies, the arms manufacturers, the military, the “monetary guardians,” and other interest groups—another, more easily understood reason for war must be provided.
An enemy who threatens the country and can be portrayed as fiendish and diabolical has always been the best propaganda argument. If Putin is a criminal who has Ukrainian children kidnapped to “erase their identity” in reform camps, this will convince many people that rearmament and war against Russia is the only solution.
Anyone who succeeds in making people believe that the enemy commits violence against children has achieved the perception of this enemy as a bestial monster. With an enemy so devoid of humanity, there can be no understanding, no peace negotiations, no mercy. Anyone who wants to make a population “bellicose" is bound to portray the enemy in this manner.
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1 https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/vietnamkrieg-a-948914.html of 6 August 2007.
2 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/27/us/afghan-children-evacuated-without-parents-cec of 27 December 2025.
3 https://www.nzz.ch/gesellschaft/russland-verschleppte-gezielt-ukrainische-kinder-ld.1778113 of 28 October 2023.
4 https://globalchildren.georgetown.edu/posts/russia-is-turning-abducted-ukrainian-children-into-soldiers of 17 June 2025.
5 https://globalbridge.ch/kinderfaenger-putin-ein-lehrstueck-ueber-fakten-chirurgie/ of 6 November 2023.
6 https://www.amnesty.de/tag/deportation of 10 September 2024.
7 https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and of 17 March 2023.
8 https://www.dw.com/de/ukraine-aktuell-eu-will-entf%C3%BChrte-kinder-suchen/a-65100955 of 24 March 2025.
9 https://www.unhcr.org/de/news/press-releases/unbegleitete-minderjaehrige-auf-der-flucht-vor-dem-eskalierenden-konflikt-der of 7 March 2022.
10 https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/ukraine-istgh-100.html of 21 August 2024.
11 https://de.rt.com/russland/247135-in-russland-verschwunden-russland-katar/ of 8 June 2025.
12 https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000264837/osze-botschafter-internationale-sicherheitsarchitektur-heutzutage-fast-nutzlos from 10 April 2025.
13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholic_Welfare_Council.
14 https://www.berichteaushavanna.de/2017/10/08/operation-peter-pan-das-eingreifen-der-cia-in-das-leben-von-14000-kubanischen-kindern/ of 8 October 2017.
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Helmut Scheben served as a correspondent in Mexico and Central America for many years. He subsequently edited WoZ, the Zürich weekly, and was later an editor and reporter for Swiss television, SRF.
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First published, in German, in Global Bridge, on 26 July. Subsequently republished in Zeit–Fragen, Horizons et débats, and Current Concerns. This translation is courtesy of Current Concerns.
“Auschwitz—never again.”
But "Gaza - no problem".
Thank you Patrick. I wrote about the corporate-owned-news (CON) lies on Substack two years ago (free).
https://johnmoffett.substack.com/p/agents-of-empire
The propagandists all know they are lying, it is not that they themselves are misinformed. For example, people like Rachel Maddow are not dumb, they know exactly what they are doing.