I’ve written before about Russia’s Stealth Genocide.
This podcast and the evidence below is about the openly admitted violation of the Genocide Convention’s prohibition against transferring children across international borders in times of war.
Many struggle to understand or to explain the aggregate of the billions of actions that constitute Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
The mass kidnapping of children is the point of the war. Russia wants repopulate its 1/6 of the world’s surface with white Europeans.
This is the whole point of the war I argue in this podcast.
See below for some of the documentary evidence I have collected and published about these Crimes Against Humanity, the Laws of War and the Genocide Convention:
Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. I want to decode the actual rationale, the real substance of the meaning of the Ukraine-Russia war. I want to decode the motivations of those prosecuting this war and leading this war. One word sums up the entire basis for the whole war: demography.
When you hear these stories about Russian language speakers in Ukraine, or NATO expansion, or “Ukraine was asking for it,” or “Ukraine is run by criminals and therefore Russia came in to liberate” — this whole system of stories which we constantly hear in our information space — I want in future you just to focus on this one word: demography.
I worked in eastern Ukraine for seven years between 2015 and 2022. One abiding joyful memory I have of my time there was every now and again I would be invited as a foreign diplomat to speak to groups of school children. In one school, one day, in a now-occupied part of eastern Ukraine, as I arrived, the head teacher — as was always normally the case — met me and said: “You’re going to be delivering your talk and your lecture and answering questions from the final-year students. However, I have picked out all of the activist students from all the previous years. So there’ll be a few boys and girls from each school year, and they’ll also be asking you questions.”
There was a look in her eye and a sense of pride as she presented this group of activist children to me. That really warmed my heart at the time. It really stayed with me. Here was a modern, European-outlooking teacher who had this concept of activist students, which I didn’t really understand until perhaps I met them. There was the girl with the spiky hair wearing black. There was the nerdy college kid who was doing political campaigning. There was somebody who talked to me about Greta Thunberg, and actually two students who wanted to do the school strike.
We had a great chat and a really engaging time. After the de-occupation, maybe I can post pictures of this. But what breaks my heart today and every day I wake up, and what motivates my work to help us decode the trolls around Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and in fact its invasion since 2014 — is the memory of these children in this school and how, almost as soon as the occupation began, Russia began forcibly transferring children from the occupied territories into Russia.
As some of you might know, I was one of the main sources — acknowledged — and if you look at my pinned tweet, you’ll see the link to this report. I was a main source for the first intergovernmental report on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, published in early April 2022 by the OSCE Moscow Mechanism Mission. It was commissioned by 44 nation states. I worked with a group of legal scholars to outline the different crimes Russia was committing — not only in invading Ukraine, but the particular way in which it was invading Ukraine.
One part of this was about the forcible transfer of Ukrainians and children, which is a specific breach of the Genocide Convention, signed by most states. It’s also a breach of the laws of war. Russia, from the very first days and moments of the invasion, was focusing an enormous amount of resources on corralling children and humans through what they call filtration centres and bringing them into Russia.
For much of the first year of the war, I focused a lot of attention on this wonderful city called Melitopol in southern Zaporizhzhia, which was an area I covered as an OSCE diplomat looking after environmental security and political issues. I went to meet as many of the elected officials leading village, city, and town councils, particularly in this area, because I knew it would be subject — even as far back as 2015, I and many others anticipated the full-scale invasion. I did not anticipate the horrors, and I did not anticipate the forcible transfer of at least 700,000 children, which Russia itself boasts about.
Putin, the so-called president of Russia — a warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court in March 2023 for the specific crime of the forcible transfer of children from Ukraine into Russia. In order to have this warrant issued against a sitting head of state who enjoys the presumption of immunity, the collection of evidence — which I participated in collecting in the early part of the war, and which I and others have continued to collect, including the confession by Putin and his accomplice, who is ironically the head of the Children’s Commission — all of this has come together.
There are many different strands to this war. Essentially, what I have come to propose as my hypothesis is that the entire war itself is a cover for the conscious and determined policy to transfer 700,000 and millions of white Ukrainians to populate the vast expanse of empty territory that Russia needs to populate.
Russia, as we know, possesses one-sixth of the world’s surface, and much of that is empty of people. We know the history — the whole of communism, all the mass deportations of people from the Baltic states, all of the genocidal policies of the USSR. It’s also about this mad idea to fill up the space between Kyiv, Lviv, and Vladivostok — from central Europe all the way to the coast of Japan and North Korea and China — with white Europeans.
I’ve talked before about the Russians I worked with in Ukraine, who were all from the security structures and were diplomats. In candid, unguarded moments, all of them always betrayed at some point this visceral fear that in the very depopulated parts of the Russian Federation which border China — China and Russia have thousands of kilometres of shared border — on the China side, in some places, there are massive cities of 10, 20 million people. On the Russia side, it’s just a handful of people with no resources or villages. I’ve never met a Russian who isn’t obsessed with the idea that the Chinese will come over this border and gobble up all of their land.
I agree with Timothy Snyder that in many respects we can conceptualise Russia’s obsession with Ukraine, and murdering Ukrainians, and destroying Ukrainian culture, as stemming from their madness that Ukraine is an easy touch. This is a displacement of their real fear, their fundamental fear, which is of China coming over the border and lopping off vast tracts of its one-sixth of the world’s surface. When I heard Timothy Snyder talking about this, I agreed wholeheartedly because of the Russians I had met who betrayed an obsessive paranoia about how their land and people would become gobbled up.
The plan is to populate this area between central Europe and Japan with white Westerners. This also explains the threats to conquer Lisbon, and the mass deportations which are a perennial factor and part of Soviet and Russian governance — under the guise of criminals, prison camps, or stopping nationalism, all this nonsense. Just as today we hear all these bogus history lessons, both from those actually leading this war — Putin and his criminal accomplices directing this criminal enterprise — but also from people in our information space and cultures who have fallen for the troll, who have fallen for all this nonsense about NATO expansion and “America provoked the war.”
All of this is accusation in a mirror, a phenomenon common to all genocides. Accusation in the mirror is what we hear all the time from the Russian leadership: accusing Ukraine of biolabs, of discriminating against Russian language speakers, of killing Russian or Ukrainian children — accusing the other. Russia is accusing Ukraine always of the very crimes which Russia itself is contemplating and executing. The mere accusation in the mirror is then used as a pretext for Russia itself to act out these crimes.
When you hear that phrase, “every accusation is a confession” — it actually has value in legal terms, in determining the level of intention on the part of the Russian state to genocide Ukrainians.
Not all wars or invasions or wars of defence are genocides. But one is when the explicit aim of the war — as manifest in, for instance, the mass deportation of millions of Ukrainians into Russia — and the International Criminal Court warrant for Putin and his children’s commissioner’s arrest includes the names of 20,000 named Ukrainian children.
Very recently, Yale School of Public Health has released a very comprehensive report detailing how aeroplanes which Russia’s presidential administration controls, and state adoption websites, and a whole system of transporting and trafficking these children — in many cases orphans whose parents Russia deliberately killed, in Mariupol and Melitopol and other places — were used to steal these children. In other cases, children’s parents in occupied areas were forced to send their children to summer camps, and they were then passed from summer camp to summer camp until they ended up in depopulated areas of Russia, where they are given Russian passports.
I would conceptualise the entire war, and Putin himself, as the child snatcher. Apart from all the nonsense we hear about land for peace, that Ukraine is somehow going to swap land for peace, and they’re going to freeze the conflict lines just when Russia is at its weakest — its problems in Syria, it has lost vast tracts of territory, it’s about to lose its main naval base, which it uses not only to bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of Syrians since 2015 but also to execute policies in Africa, which currently in the Sudan region are leading to the mass starvation of almost a million people and the threatened starvation of millions more.
What is making me increasingly convinced that demography and mass transportation is the actual reason for the war, and everything else is just a distraction, is this: the main reason the war is being prosecuted is to get not just Ukrainian children — obviously they are obsessed with Ukraine and with destroying Ukraine — but also all central and western Europeans.
I’d like us to bear this in mind. In the communities in which we participate, when we hear people talking about “Ukraine should just surrender its land and there will be peace,” I want people to focus their minds on not just how morally diabolical and illegal and unlawful it is to snatch the children of any parent, but to do it on this scale — where potentially millions of children and humans, mostly women, are forcibly transferred into Russia.
Russia is not going to stop doing this when it empties Ukraine of as many people as it can. It’s moving westwards. It wants to shell Lisbon. It wants to shell London. It wants to destroy Dublin. It wants to get to Paris. Why? Because it wants the people. It wants your children and my children and our children’s children — as it did to all of the Baltic, eastern European, Ukrainian, central European, and former Soviet socialist republics, under the guise of various population migration and criminal policies.
The one constant in this governance unit we call Russia is mass deportation and trying to populate this vast area with white Europeans.
At the beginning of the war, in March, as I was doing research for this report — the OSCE Moscow Mechanism Mission’s report — I was looking at the granular detail of what was going on in Melitopol, what the Russians were doing. It was really curious to me that Russia, which at the time was really not having a good battle or a good war, even while they were fighting for control of parts of a city, was also focusing on deporting and forcibly transferring children in a very organised way. That tempo has never stopped. There’s been no pause in it.
It was very curious to me: why, if you were simply trying to take land, or capture natural resources, oil wells, or nuclear power plants, or pay the West back for humiliating you, or any of this nonsense — why are they investing so much in the forcible transfer of people and children?
The answer, I now believe, is because the whole point of the invasion and occupation is to replace — at the moment — 700,000 dead or injured Russian soldiers, who have already been replaced by 700,000 clever, innovative, young Ukrainian children. Some of whom may well have been listening to my talk in southern Zaporizhzhia, who horrifically might be those activist children, boys and girls, who I met that day when I visited the school.
I propose this as the dominant determining approach, and it should inform every conversation we have about trying to force Ukraine to sacrifice its children. Because there aren’t enough Ukrainian children to satisfy the bloodlust, or the need for the Muscovite European power — which has always been based and ruled around St Petersburg and Moscow — to rule one-sixth of the world’s surface with not enough people.
Not only are Putin and Russia obsessed with demography, but I don’t think we’re thinking big enough when we look at people like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or any of these people obsessed with Sulla and his depopulation policies of ancient Rome, and the depopulation of huge territories. At the same time, they’re also personally obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive systems and making women bear as many children as possible. It’s said that Musk has many children and wants to have thousands of children. These people, like Putin, are also obsessed with demography, as are the people around them, the oligarchs. Not only are they making a personal contribution to impregnating as many women as possible so that their own special genes and genome are promoted, but they also have this huge vision for our society and our community.
I’m not saying the bromance between Elon Musk and Putler is because of this. I believe it’s because of two factors. One: the threat to destroy SpaceX’s satellite network in space, which Russia continues to speak about. Two: most of the Russian nomenklatura’s money, I believe, is in Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County, where a quarter of the world’s venture capital is invested and half of America’s venture capital is invested, is in Silicon Valley.
What explains the opposition to Ukraine’s glorious fight against this genocidal invasion — and all of the 150,000 war crimes documented and continuing to be documented, the horrific events which happen all the time — I believe, is explained by these oligarchs’ fear of secondary sanctions, which would necessitate unwinding all of these venture capital funds from Silicon Valley which contain Russia and Putin’s billions and trillions, whatever amounts of money they have, all wrapped up in there. They want to avoid that.
But there is also a meeting of minds. This conservative, neo-patriarchal, evangelical view: that women should have as many children as possible, that they don’t need to experience human rights or choice or control over their own reproductive powers. That we need a society of people with very little freedom who can work like little hamsters on the wheel and in the fields and replace the migrants.
This is not my vision, but it is mainstream among this group of people who believe that the fundamental struggle in our time — and this is something Putin believes, he’s talked about it a lot — is between those who believe in the post-World War II legal order guaranteeing human rights, the right to participate in public life, which makes discriminating on certain protective grounds such as sex or political viewpoints or gender identity illegal, and the aspiration we have to a more equal society, where everyone — the activist children, the conformist children, all of us — have the same rights of access to education, healthcare, jobs, a future, to build or create from these amazing opportunities that many of us listening have had, to try and sculpt a life which has brought me to this point where I’m now able to speak to you through these amazing technologies.
What they want is a Handmaid’s Tale, basically. This is what unites them all. These mass deportations, mass murder, mass deportations of people and children are very consistent with this. Their vision — the vision of these guys in Silicon Valley, these paleoconservatives in the West and in Russia and around Putin — is completely consistent with each other.
I’d like to leave you with this idea: the invasion is all about this Eurasian, crazy idea of populating these areas with white Europeans. While the focus is on Ukrainians — and the Russians have destroyed their country permanently, on the basis of their hatred and their othering and their genocidal war against Ukrainians — Russia will not stop at Ukraine.
Russia’s aim is to destroy our entire civilisation. Its aim is to capture all of our children and do to them what they are doing to Ukrainian children. The trajectory is clear.
When I worked in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, I developed my understanding of Disinfolklore and how Russia uses information warfare to brainwash people. The success in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk could be seen in how Ukrainians, over the course of a number of years, were convinced that they weren’t Ukrainian, that they were Russian, and that other Ukrainians — their fellow Ukrainians — wanted to kill them, were trying to come across this river where I worked.
I worked on this bridge, this river, in a place called Stanytsia Luhanska. The people in Russia-occupied Ukraine, on one side of the Donets River, were convinced through a vast Disinfolklore apparatus. Think of what MAGA has created — these systems of communications. They’re very similar systems, uncannily similar, but many of the same people who designed them also designed aspects of this war.
People like Paul Manafort, who was one of Trump’s advisors and was also the advisor to Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine who fled in February 2014 in the face of protest. Paul Manafort was jailed for fraud and for working as a foreign agent without registering. His own daughters, in text messages we got access to a year after the Maidan in 2015, accused their own father of purposefully provoking the massacres and advising his then boss, the now-exiled, impeached president of Ukraine, to shoot at the protesters — because of this mad idea that if they shot at the protesters and killed some of them, the European powers would pressure Ukraine to capitulate.
We’re still in this story again and again. Many of us will come across in our communities this idea that Ukraine should just sit down at the negotiation table and give away its land and give away its children. These are children just like yours and mine and our friends’ and the children we see playing in the park — the children I saw in these schools when I spoke about the West and about Europe. These are children who want to live in free democratic societies.
Whenever anyone is trying to work out what this war is about, I’d like us to think that the dominant determinant of the war is Russia’s mad obsession with demography, white supremacy, peopling this vast tract of land where they have subdued and subverted and genocided — I think it’s 82 small-numbered peoples, that’s their official term — the indigenous people in these areas between Siberia and Ukraine, which itself has three different kinds of indigenous peoples: the Crimean Tatars and two other designated indigenous peoples.
I’ll leave you with that. The war is about demography and the mass transfer of children. That should be foremost in our minds as we persuade our politicians and those who have influence to help arm Ukraine to resist this suppression and liberate the land. There’s no other word for it — it’s monstrous.
Thank you for listening.
