Douglas Macgregor and Ukraine's Missing Children

"The people bathing in blood are in Kiev, in Washington, not in Moscow"

It’s really not worth debunking Colonel Douglas Macgregor, because he’s long been established as a mouthpiece for pro-Russia propaganda with scant relation with the truth. Literally his first answer to Tucker Carlson includes an incredible falsehood, that “Ukraine now we think have lost 400,000 men killed in battle.” While the numbers we actually have are indeed staggering, the actual military deaths for Ukraine are believed to be 70,000, with another 120,000 wounded — compared to Russian figures believed to be 300,000 casualties including 120,000 deaths. When he’s off by that much right off the bat, you know you’re not going to be getting the best information.

So let’s just focus on one thing that’s said near the end, which leads to Macgregor predicting the end of NATO. It’s about children (emphasis mine):

“I think everything else is fake, too. We estimate that at least 60,000 children from Ukraine have disappeared vanished since this war began. Where are they? What about all of the women that have been sold into prostitution that once lived in Ukraine. This war is a catastrophe. The people bathing in blood are in Kiev, in Washington, not in Moscow. And this sort of thing is is going to play well until it can't. And that's the sad part we're going to see this whole thing collapse and implode it's coming.”

“And with it NATO?”

“I would think so. Because the Europeans right now Germany is well into a recession it is systematically de-industrialized itself by casting its lot with the anti-Russian crowd. And remember that in Europe it was not very difficult to supply stereotypes left over from the Second World War of the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet Army was you know an exercise in barbarism and savagery, mass rape you name it. That's not Russia today. Russia today is a very different society, very different state and that's been Putin's effort. From day one he's been interested in restoring Russia as an Orthodox Christian state with a true national identity and a strong national culture. That's probably another reason why so many people want to destroy Russia because it's the last European state that has not been flooded with foreigners and turned into some sort of polyglot experiment.”

Well, we do actually know where many of these children are, and they’re not in Kyiv or Washington. They’re in Russia and Belarus, part of an intentional effort on the part of Russia to propagandize Ukrainian kids, undermining and dashing hopes for its future. It’s an approach Russia has been using to pull children out of areas Ukrainian forces have retaken:

The scenes are part of a 2-minute video Kastyukevich posted on the Telegram messaging app showing Russian officials and their local allies removing young children from the Regional Children’s Home in Kherson in late October, weeks before it was liberated by Ukrainian forces. Dozens of children were taken to “safety,” he said.

According to Kyiv, the video is evidence in a growing case against the Kremlin for its alleged war crimes in Ukraine. The country accuses Moscow of abducting tens of thousands of its children and shipping them to Russia with the intent of stripping them of their national identity, a crime that Ukrainian officials call a form of genocide. Russia denies allegations of war crimes, and says it has evacuated close to 2 million civilians, including hundreds of thousands of children, from what it said were dangerous areas of Ukraine. 

Here’s the WSJ today:

Belarus, a staunch ally of Russia, has transported thousands of Ukrainian children—some of them orphans—to the country, where they were exposed to pro-Kremlin propaganda, an effort that underscores the former Soviet nation’s support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
 
More than 2,000 children have been brought by rail from Russian-occupied areas in Ukraine to Belarus as part of an agreement between Russia and Belarus, according to a publicly available document from the Belarusian government as well as leaked documents from Russian Railways and Belaruskali, a Belarus company funding the effort.

According to the documents, the children have been brought by rail to Belarus’s capital, Minsk, and then transported to camps on buses owned by soccer team Shakhtyor Soligorsk. The team, owned by Belaruskali Chief Executive Ivan Golovaty, won the Belarusian Premier League last year but was stripped of its title due to a match-fixing scandal…

Belaruskali, a state-owned miner of the potassium-based fertilizer potash, has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the European Union and is the country’s biggest taxpayer. According to the leaked documents, the company spent millions of dollars to bring seven groups of 310 children each from Ukraine since spring 2022 to the company’s sanatorium at Dubrava, a children’s camp it owns in the south of Belarus, where they stayed between two and three weeks at a time…

Photos of the camp circulating on the social-media accounts of Belaruskali and the facilities hosting the children show that they were given basic arms training, met with Russian Orthodox priests and were regaled with flashy shows that glorified Russian President Vladimir Putin.
 
In one video recorded in October and posted on the same social-media channels, two women entertain a group of children gathered in a small theater, praising the Kremlin leader while calling for the deaths of President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The National Anti-Crisis Management Group established the identities of the children in the video using leaked information from officials inside the sanatoria, and Ukrainian orphanages identified some of the children as orphans from Ukraine.

“So that Putin prospers and takes control of all of Ukraine,” one of the two women, holding a microphone under stage lights, said to the applause of the children.

You can watch a video of the indoctrinating reeducation camps here.

I wish that the American right could have a real conversation about our strategy regarding Ukraine and what we ought to do post-Joe Biden. But such a conversation is impossible without dealing with the facts as they are. Being realistic about what is possible to achieve requires that much, but so does being clear about the ramifications of what will happen absent American support — not just to Ukraine, but to NATO as well.