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** Report from Ukraine: Why They Fight ([link removed])
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by Richard Kemp • May 25, 2023 at 5:00 am
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* I asked what they now needed most from our countries. Of course more guns, more ammo, more tanks, more rockets plus combat planes always featured. But another consistent answer was striking even if not surprising: please do not try to force our country to make peace with the invaders.
* The government in Kyiv has so far documented 19,393 kidnapped children, and there are most likely many more that are as yet unidentified.
* Like the torture and murder of civilians in Izium and elsewhere, and the summary execution of prisoners of war, these kidnappings are war crimes. It is for these abductions that the International Criminal Court in March issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and his so-called Children's Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova.
* Putin's forces and civilian bureaucrats have seized children from orphanages and children's homes, removed them directly from their parents or taken them into "care" after killing their families. Some have been forcibly fostered or adopted in cities including Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Rostov. Names and dates of birth are sometimes changed to render them untraceable.
* While torture and murder cannot be undone, Russia's child kidnapping can, and it is inexplicable that so far there has been no large scale international outrage.
* [K]nowledge of these wicked depredations is why they fight; and why they and the fighting men on Ukraine's other battlefields remain determined to keep attacking, holding the invaders from their families' doors until they drive them back beyond their borders, no matter what the personal cost might be.

Russian forces and civilian bureaucrats have seized nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children from orphanages and children's homes, removed them directly from their parents or taken them into "care" after killing their families. Knowledge of these wicked depredations is why Ukrainians fight on the battlefield, determined to keep attacking, holding the invaders from their families' doors. Pictured: A Ukrainian soldier in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on April 23, 2023. (Photo by Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

This week, near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, I spent time with commanders and soldiers who have been fighting the Russian invaders in the shattered city, sometimes for months on end. This has been one of the longest battles anywhere in the world since 1945 and by far the most brutal in this war, with Russians and Ukrainians often fighting at close quarters, artillery hammering the city into Stalingrad-like rubble and a level of slaughter unequalled anywhere else in Putin's vicious war.

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