And another atrocity
Greg Sargent reports that Marco Rubio, the alleged diplomat, has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth during peace talks as his state department helps the Russians evade responsibility for their war crimes:
The State Department has quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime—to law enforcement officials in Europe, two people familiar with the situation tell The New Republic.
The nixed award could make it harder to continue tracking down the kidnapped Ukrainian kids and complicate efforts to seek accountability for the abductions, says one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the ongoing operation.
One of Ukraine’s central demands for any peace deal is the return of Ukrainian children who have allegedly been the victims of a Russian program of coerced adoption. Russia has claimed this program is a humanitarian one that benevolently adopts Ukrainian kids and makes them citizens. But under President Biden, the State Department strongly condemned it as the “forcible transfer and deportation of Ukraine’s children to camps promoting indoctrination in Russia.”
Indeed, as The New York Times reported, Russia has not just transferred children from Ukrainian orphanages to Russian camps; it has also taken kids whose relatives want them back. The Times noted that the abductees number in the “thousands,” and concluded: “This mass transfer of children is a potential war crime.”
The contract is with Yale School of Public Health which uses sophisticated technological analysis to identify and track these kids.
They were supposed to transfer the data to Europol, the EU’s police force, but this cancellation has interrupted it. It’s very hard to see why they would do this unless Russia demanded it which is entirely possible since the lab released an explosive report to the United Nations last December which resulted in a referral to the International Criminal Court.
There is much more at the link about the horror of these mass abductions and the response to it here in the US and around the world. Until recently, even under Rubio, this was considered to be a top issue in any peace deal. Rubio appears to have decided it doesn’t matter.
He has a place reserved in the VIP section of hell.