Children wait near the site of Okhmatdyt children’s hospital hit by Russian missiles, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on July 8.Evgeniy Maloletka/The Associated Press
Ian Garner is an assistant professor of totalitarian studies at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw.
After a missile struck Okhmatdyt, a major children’s hospital in Kyiv, in what the Security Service of Ukraine says was a deliberate attack by Moscow, shocking scenes of suffering were broadcast around the world. Bloodied, crying children were pulled from rubble as evacuees received their regular treatment at makeshift stations on the street outside. At least two children and several dozen adults are dead, and more fatalities are likely to be discovered in time.
These horrible images represent an explicit puncturing of official Russian rhetoric, which has claimed that it is Kyiv that seeks to attack the young. In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war after accusing a “Nazi” Ukraine of killing children in the breakaway territories of Luhansk and Donetsk with “no end in sight.” Since the seizure of those regions and Crimea in 2014, propagandists have churned out unfounded claims that Kyiv is deliberately targeting “ethnic Russian” children in the country’s East. Russian TV even ran a “Stop the Killing” fundraiser for children in Donbas in 2017.
Since 2022, this rhetoric has escalated. As recently as this June, Mr. Putin claimed that the “constant killing” of children by Ukraine forces continued unabated. Russian television stations and social media channels are frequently flooded with saccharine stories of Ukrainian children “rescued” by Russian forces thanks to the war. In this world, the aim of Russia’s war is to save Ukraine’s children.
Reality tells a different story. The deaths at the Okhmatdyt hospital can be added to the hundreds – potentially thousands – of children killed in the invasion. Many thousands more have been forcibly deported to Russia for adoption there. Children under occupation, meanwhile, learn a school syllabus that denigrates Ukrainian culture and language in favour of Russia’s. After school, many are forced into Moscow’s paramilitary youth groups, branches of which sprang up even as fighting continued in contested regions, and which seek to prepare teens to fight against their own country.
Ukraine’s children are not being saved by Russia’s invasion. They and their Ukrainian-ness are being systematically erased in what amounts to a cultural genocide.
What might seem like an untenable contradiction, however, is part and parcel of Moscow’s vision of the future for both Russian and Ukrainian youth. At home, through a mandatory new school syllabus and patriotism lessons, as well as through state youth groups, young Russians learn that Russia is – and always has been – surrounded by enemies that seek not just to attack the country but to totally eliminate its culture: historically, Mongolian, Napoleonic and Nazi forces. Today, the enemy is “Westernism”: not just NATO, but a purportedly debased youth culture that promotes the ”anti-family ideology” of the LGBTQ community, Europeanism, and other values supposedly antithetical to Russian ones. The Russian nation is, according to state propagandists and officials, “infected” by the disease of Westernism.
In the Putinist world view, Ukrainians simply are Russians living in a country whose boundaries extend beyond the Russian Federation and into Ukraine and Belarus. Indeed, Mr. Putin has often claimed that Ukraine is an “artificial state” that simply does not exist, that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, and that the West is forcibly attempting to transform Ukraine into an “anti-Russia.”
Ukrainian culture and language are thus another form of the Westernism that threatens to debase children the state considers young Russians. To fight Ukraine and to kill “infected” Ukrainians is, in a bizarre leap of logic, thus an act of salvation. Destroying Ukraine is, as one new school textbook puts it, to engage in “saving peace,” just as destroying LGBTQ+ communities and other “non-Russian” elements through punitive legislation and re-education programs promises to save Russians at home. By this thinking, the “infected” young of Ukraine, who lean overwhelmingly toward Europe in political outlook, must for their own good be Russified by force – and the less Ukrainian culture and fewer Ukrainian people that exist, the lower the chance that Russia could be permanently infected with “Westernism.”
In this sense, the attack on the Okhmatdyt hospital is, for the Putinist, part of a war for the future of Russia. According to this logic, the more Ukraine suffers, the closer Moscow’s victims come to returning to and remaining in their rightful historical and cultural place. For the adherents of this ideology, the contradiction that seems obvious simply does not exist. Russia simultaneously destroys Ukrainian culture and saves Ukrainians, kills children and saves them, and wages war to make peace.