Poland’s Sikorski to Putin: You Are Putting Ukrainian Children in Camps Like Nazis Did in My Country

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski in a blistering Tuesday address to the UN Security Council in New York took down Russia’s national leadership for launching a war of aggression in Ukraine and committing thousands of war crimes, among them taking Ukrainian children away from their parents and training them to become loyal Russian citizens.

The immediate target of Sikorski’s highly undiplomatic, and at times eviscerating comments was Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya, who, Sikorski said, had lied and peddled falsehoods about Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.

Nebenzya, in a speech preceding Sikorski’s during Security Council debate on the Russo-Ukrainian War, repeated longstanding Moscow messaging that Ukraine’s national leadership was fascist and Nazi and that Russia’s February 2022 main force military invasion of Ukraine was peacefully intended and legal.

Occupying Russian troops and officials have for the past 30 months rounded up thousands of Ukrainian children, against their parents’ will, and shipped them into Russia for adoption and re-education to make them loyal to the Moscow regime, Sikorski said.

“UN investigators concluded that these actions constitute war crimes. In October 2022 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. Ambassador Nebenzya and Russian propagandists like to refer to the democratically elected government of Ukraine as Nazis, as you have just heard,” Sikorski said.

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“It so happens, that in Poland, I live three kilometers from Potulice, the site of a former Nazi filtration camp during the Second World War. It’s known for a fact that thousands of children were imprisoned there – from Poland, and the Soviet Union, from around Smolensk and Vitebsk. Up to 800 of these children died. But thousands were transferred west to be Germanized. Blond, blue-eyed, ‘Aryan’ children deemed to be ‘racially suitable.’”

“I therefore have a few questions for the Russian Ambassador and his superiors. How does what you are doing to Ukrainian kidnapped children differ from what German Nazis did to your children and ours? How many Russian officials have adopted stolen [inaudible] Ukrainian children?...When will you return the thousands of stolen Ukrainian children back to Ukraine? Do you know that stealing another country’s children, is tantamount to genocide?” he said.

Sikorski at the outset of the speech stated that he wrote it personally.

“Permanent members of the UN Security Council are supposed to be guardians of peace, and not to fight their wars, with other peoples’ children. This is Russia’s shame, that will not be forgiven or forgotten,” Sikorski concluded.

The official full-length video of Sikorski’s speech is here.