Let's deal first with the Russian way of war and violations of the genocide convention. Here is a genuine violation. The transfer of children is a war crime. Russians don't care. This is about Russification and a demographic collapse. So this is about one child, one family.

It is also about the well-connected and the erasure of identity. This child is too young to remember where she was born. She will grow up as an excellent Russian citizen. She will likely need to learn what it is to be a Ukrainian. This story is as old as the Russia of the Tsars. And since her origin is also changed in her documents, it's as if she was never born in Ukraine:

The head of A Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, and his wife secretly adopted a child taken from Ukraine, changing both his name and place of birth in the documents.

At the end of August 2022, Mironov's wife Inna Varlamova arrived in the Kherson region along with Mironov's first deputy in the State Duma, Yana Lantratova. They didn't leave alone. Local occupation authorities issued a power of attorney for them to remove two children from the Kherson orphanage — 10-month-old Margarita Prokopenko and two-year-old Ilya Vashchenko, writes "Important Stories".

A week after being deported from Ukraine, Margarita and Ilya ended up in the Moscow region. To adopt a child in Russia, you need to apply to the court. These cases are considered in a special order. In November 2022, such a case was heard in the Podolsk City Court of the Moscow Region. "Important Stories" has documents at its disposal that indicate: a month after the court decision, in December 2022, Sergei Mironov and Inna Varlamova adopted Margarita Prokopenko, who was taken from Kherson. The girl became Marina Sergeevna Mironova. Not only her name and parents were changed, but also her place of birth: instead of Ukrainian Kherson — Podolsk near Moscow. A source familiar with the situation of Margarita and Ilya told Important Stories that Margarita's biological mother was deprived of parental rights and her father died, but she has other relatives. Ilya's fate is completely unknown.

"This is considered genocide and violates paragraph "e" of Art. 2 of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide: forcible transfer of children from one human group to another. These children often have relatives or guardians in Ukraine who have lost contact with them, and in the case of children from orphanages, the guardians are officials of these institutions. According to international law, the parties to the conflict must provide relatives and guardians with information about the missing and facilitate their search," lawyer Maria Chashchilova told reporters.

This is not the only story. There are 200,000 estimated missing children that Russia took. These missing children were taken to another country to become Russians. They were taken to forget who they were. This it is a war crime. Another story on this, now via NBC News:

On Sept. 1, 2022, Stetsenko sent Nikita to a boarding school in the occupied village of Kupyansk, about an hour outside of Ukraine's easternmost city, Kharkiv. She said later, she figured it was safer than her home village of Pischane, deeper into Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

"If only I had known," she said, not finishing her sentence.

A week later, on Sept. 8, Russian troops took Nikita and 12 classmates from the basement of the Kupyansk Special School, loaded them onto trucks and transferred them to Svatove, in Russian-occupied Luhansk.

Two days later, Kupyansk was retaken by Ukrainian troops in a sweeping counteroffensive, but by then, the school was empty. Around that same time, satellite imagery shows the bridge between Stetsenko's village of Pischane and Kupyansk had been blown up, destroying the only route she could take.

Ukraine is trying to rescue these children. She is trying to bring them home. Some have, in the dozens. A little-known part of the Holocaust, partially why this is a violation of international law, was children taken during the war. Most were babies. After the battle, special teams were formed to rescue these Jewish children. This is but one of those stories. Children were lost, and some were found:

At their home, Mira was reunited with her mother, Mindla, but their reunion did not last long. With the liquidation of the ghetto in Kazimierza Wielka, only 22 local Jews survived the daily killings. Most likely, in the midst of everyday terror, between the different Aktions, Mira was smuggled out of the ghetto and placed with a local Polish Christian family. According to Eliyahu who had contacts with local Christian Poles, he arranged a hiding place for Mira. It is possible that one of the two local middle schools hid Mira in his home and might have adopted her in the aftermath of the war. But the headmaster in question and any other witnesses have not yet been located. Both Mira's parents perished separately during the Holocaust. But her uncle, Eliyahu survived and searched for his niece immediately after the war. He did not encounter any trace of Mira and he left Poland for good soon after.

Nevertheless, Eliyahu did not give up and he kept searching for Mira into the 1960s. On 25 January 1965, from his home in the USA, he wrote an emotional letter to the Jewish Community of Cracow, asking for assistance in finding Mira. Eliyahu passed away in 1971. Today, a Polish woman, Katarzyna Szuszkiewicz, of the Jewish Community Centre of Cracow, with the assistance of a local historian, Tadeusz Kozioł, are trying to help his son, Jack Skovronsky in his ongoing search for Mira. If alive, Mira is now an 83-year-old woman who may, or may not, be aware of her painful past and of her family's origins. Like Alexander Bickels, Mira Moneta belongs to a group of missing child Holocaust survivors from Poland.

Here, Russia is repeating this. Near his death, my father told me some of the stories. After the war, he was involved in some of these rescues. He knew this part of the story was unknown because the rescuers violated local laws. We are watching this again. In the middle of a war, Ukrainians are trying to rescue their children. They have ILH on their side. But Russia is not going to let go of their prices quickly. The young ones, especially, cannot remember who they are. This is one of those aspects of this war that has mostly been lost. It's also a mirror to the past in those bloody borderlands. I wish that I did not record those last conversations with dad, and this is my kick. He was a resistance member, forced to grow up too fast. After the war, he was one of those rescuers. He kept his stories to himself. Mostly to protect us from war.

The Wives of the Mobilized

Now, we come to another piece of the puzzle. One that echoes the last war of the Soviet Union. Soviet women were essential in bringing that war to an end. They protested before even the Soviet press was able to report. In the end, the press did report, and the Soviet Union withdrew the army after ten long years and a lot fewer casualties than this war:

Gatilov further refused to comment on a question regarding the pivotal role of the Soviet press in bringing Moscow's war in Afghanistan to an end in February 1989 once it was allowed to report openly. At the same time, Soviet mothers were conducting their own protests against the war by holding vigils in cemeteries at the graves of their sons, husbands, brothers, and other family members who died in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union's secret police, the KGB, at first sought to contain these demonstrations but then eventually allowed them to take place as it proved awkward to reprimand the women.

While the official figure for Afghanistan lingers at 15,000 Soviet dead, a more likely estimate stands at 25,000 or more. In contrast, this is four to five times less than the number of Russian soldiers believed to have been killed in Ukraine. According to a just released assessment by the White House, over 20,000 Russian combatants, both military and the Wagner mercenary group, are believed to have been killed in current fighting in Bakhmut alone together with 80,000 injured.

In an echo of that war, the wives of the mobilized are now holding protests. They are putting pressure on the state. And it's not just one example:

Relatives of those mobilized came to the St. Petersburg reception of the chairman of United Russia demanding that their men be returned home

There they were met by State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov:

– When will the mobilized be replaced?

– Of course they will, now we'll win — and everyone..! <…> Those who escaped are cowards and scum, and yours are the best! <…> When my grandfather fought…

– We've already heard about ཥ!

– There's no need to "hear." When my grandfather went to war — one of my grandfathers died, the other returned — no one talked about the timing.

Milonov said that his assistants, minus one or two, were also sent to war. He repeated this word several times

According to the women, they have already visited many officials: they went to Smolny, took 100,000 signatures weighing 30 kg to the presidential administration in Moscow, visited the Ministry of Defense and the prosecutor's office, and yesterday they met with the Vice-Governor of St. Petersburg Boris Piotrovsky. But in all these cases we received only papers.

Now the women are seeking the creation of a regional working group, a meeting with deputies, including the head of the State Duma Defense Committee Andrei Kartapolov, as well as Governor Beglov.

Relatives of the mobilized also insist on allowing a rally for the return of the mobilized (it was banned in St. Petersburg under the pretext of Covid) and discussing this issue at Putin's press conference.

This is the beginning of more serious, effective protests. Vladimir Putin knows this. So there are efforts to discredit them, just as they did with the wives of the crew members of the Kursk submarine. Women have been an effective means to push back since Soviet times.

This is also a result of mistreatment of mobilized personnel, lack of equipment, and no rotations at home. Not doing the last also hurts the effectiveness of a military force. But the Russian way of war is not the Western way of war.

From the polls, I covered them in another piece; Russians seem to be losing a taste for this war. The 100 rubble bill only contains Crimea. There is noise of pressure in Kherson. It appears to be significant, but until STRATCOM says something, I will respect their request for operational silence.

However, as this story points out in the first part, Russia continues to commit war crimes. These are crimes that are usually hidden. Now, we had an admission to a specific one by the Russian Ministry of Defense:

The official Telegram channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense published videos of two war crimes

The publication was noticed by the Conflict Intelligence Team. The first video appeared on the Ministry of Defense channel on November 18. In it, a drone drops ammunition on a group of Ukrainian Armed Forces military personnel evacuating a wounded colleague. The description of the video confirms its content: "UAV operators destroyed Ukrainian Armed Forces attack aircraft who were trying to rescue a wounded colleague."

On November 20, a second video with similar content appeared on the military department's channel: a drone of the Russian Armed Forces attacks a Ukrainian sanitary evacuation group.

The actions of the Russian military contradict the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit special attacks on the wounded and paramedics.

Earlier, a lot of evidence of war crimes committed by both sides during the war in Ukraine appeared in the press. However, this is the first time that one of the parties has actually publicly admitted to committing them.

I could quote chapters and verses from the conventions. Suffice it to say Russia is using the cover of the Hanas-Israel war because they know attention is turned elsewhere.

This is a textbook violation. Medics are protected during evacuations. However, it has not been on your TV. There is a lot that has yet to be on your TV. However, I will recommend the Frontline Special 20 Days in Mariupol. It's hard watching, but it does contain a few violations of that same law. Everybody seems an expert now due to the other front in this war.