(Image by Olga Wilson; found here)
The BBC has reported that Russia has changed its theater commander in southern and eastern Ukraine:
I don’t think the Syria experience is going to amount to much here, but it is clear that the Russians have decided that what they had been doing – four component commanders in theater all reporting directly back to and being coordinated by Moscow – was not working. As a result, they’ve decided to streamline things. Given that this reinvasion is really Clausewitz’s maxim that war is politics with other means made real, I’m not sure that much of anything done militarily will make a difference. Putin is prosecuting a political, social, cultural, and religious dispute with his army, a little bit with his air force, and wee bit with his navy. Streamlining and unifying command is all well and good, but as we use to tell our students in Seminar 12 at USAWC: strategy cannot give policy that which policy does not provide.
Lyudmila Denisova, the Ukrainian Obudswoman for Human Rights, has issued a number of statements today. They’re all on her Facebook. I was able to pull one despite not having a Facebook account. The other two are copied and pasted screengrabs from here and here (emphasis mine in the copy and paste in the quite box). Ms. Denisova’s reporting includes references to sexual assault, rape, and other brutalization of Ukrainians. So if this is the type of thing that really upsets you, you may want to skip over this section!
Russia’s occupying country kidnaps Ukrainian children.
Rashist media began to publish information about the initiative of the President of the Russian Federation to amend the legislation to organize an accelerated procedure for the adoption of children from Donbass.
It is reported that the State Duma is already working on appropriate amendments to the legislation, after which the replacement of the family for the child will be impossible.
According to various sources, more than 121,000 children have already been forcibly deported to the Russian Federation. These are both orphans and those who have parents.
It is now known that some of the children were taken by the occupiers from Mariupol to Donetsk and in the direction of Taganrog.
Russian invaders say they are orphans, but all orphans, including orphanages, were evacuated from Mariupol and centralized on February 24-25 during the first two days of the war.
Ukraine has no information that children who are planned to be adopted have the status of orphans or deprived of parental care.
Russia is repeating the scenario of 2014, when it took Ukrainian children out of the occupied Crimea by the so-called “train of hope” for their adoption.
Russia has been expelled from the European Network of Ombudsmen for Children’s Rights (ENOC) for abducting children from the Crimean peninsula.
Now racists, firing rockets and tanks at the homes of Ukrainian citizens, are killing parents and kidnapping our children in the occupied territories of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Such actions of the Russian Federation are a gross violation of Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides that every child has the right to a name and citizenship, as well as the right to know their parents and the right to care, Article 49 of the Geneva Convention on Civil Protection population during the war, which prohibits forced individual or mass resettlement or deportation.
In addition, Article 21 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides that adoption in another country may be considered only as an alternative means of caring for a child if the child cannot be placed in foster care or to a family that could provide for her or him upbringing or adoption in the country of origin.
I call on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the UN Human Rights Committee, and the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) to intervene to prevent the illegal removal of Ukrainian citizens from Ukraine and their subsequent illegal adoption on the aggressor’s territory.
I ask the Office of the Prosecutor General to investigate the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during Russia’s Military Invasion of Ukraine and the expert mission set up by the OSCE participating States under the Moscow Mechanism to take into account these violations of Ukrainian children’s rights, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
#ОБСЄ #OSCE #UN #ООН #GANHRI #Офіс_Генерально
го_прокурора_Ук раїни
Much more after the jump!