April 2, 2023

Bombshell report debunks ICC ‘arrest warrant’ for Mr Putin and Ms Lvova-Belova [it is recent Sputnik’s comment with my additional comments placed in [ …]. Note: the current Report is issued in addition to my Open letter to the ICC sent on March 17, 2023 incorporated in my Report # 217.

 *   *   *

A stunning new report has debunked the narrative that “camps” in Russia for children from the Donbass constitute ‘crimes against humanity,’ completely undermining the allegations that serve as the basis for the International Criminal Court’s or the ICC in the Hague arrest warrant for Russian President Vladmir Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Ms Maria Lvova-Belova.

[MY COMMENT: 1. A ‘pioneer camp’ is not a ‘concentration camp’. There is a striking difference in this word in Russian language. Despite this fact many Western reporters and politicians apply to the word ‘camp’ the meaning created by Nazi Germany during the WWII that is in a negative sense.

2. From October 2022 the whole area of Donbass, except a small area still controlled by Armed Forces of Ukraine or AFU that attacked it since April 13^th, 2014 on the basis of president a.i.  Aleksandr Turchinov’s decree No. 405/2024, is a legal and real territory of the Russian Federation. All those citizens in Donbass who wished to obtain Russian citizenship can stay and travel freely everywhere they so desire].

In late March, the Prosecutor General for the ICC claimed that President Putin had personally committed a "war crime," citing what it insisted was the "unlawful deportation" and "unlawful transfer" of children from the regions of the Donbass that the Kiev regime claims as its own. The ICC prosecutor "appeared to have based his arrest warrant on research produced by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL)," a State Department-funded entity whose executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, recently claimed on CNN that "thousands of children are in a hostage situation," per The Grayzone, an American investigative outlet.

State Department spokesman Ned Price seized on that report, which his employer funded, to condemn what he called "Russia's system of forced relocation, re-education and adoption of Ukraine's children," an allegation which was later echoed by the ICC.

[MY COMMENT: 1. It is a faked statement made by Ned Price. Because no child from Donbass has been “relocated, re-educated and adopted in Russia”. There are no such proved facts.

2. Many Donbass children have escaped from brutal Ukrainian aggression, while several hundred children in Donbass have been killed or wounded by constant AFU fire that deliberately was aimed at civilians and social infrastructure since April 2014 after Turchinov instructions.

In total, since April 13, 2014 till February 14, 2022 around 14,000 civilians in Donbass have been killed and more than 34,000 civilians have been injured by AFU also in Donbass. At the second stage of the Ukrainian/NATO aggression against Russia that began since February 14, 2022, or ten days after Moscow has launched a responsive and defensive ‘Special Military Operation’, around 5,000 more civilians have been killed in Donbass and nearly 9,000 civilians have been injured, including several dozens of children.

Recent data of massacre arranged by Ukraine and NATO in Donbass between 27 March-April 2, 2023 (usually they shell 10-15 populated areas per day/night):

• number missiles and shells fired = 619;
• number of civilians killed = 16;
• number of civilians injured = 101;
• including children = 26  (one killed and 25 injured);
• including 10 children injured by Ukrainian-made PFM-1 anti-personnel mines prohibited by the international law 

Why the ICC sitting in the Hague, and many ‘human rights’ activists in NATO and in the EU countries are still silent to all these massacres?  Who in the West has protected small kids in Donbass from AFU genocide that is lasting uninterruptedly for NINE years? May be, they are protected by NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe and the OSCE or by the ICC in the Hague? Protected by U.S and French presidents? Or British Prime Ministers? By NONE of them. Dead silence goes on. All are deaf and blind.

3. There is no need ‘to re-educate’ children from Donbass, because they were born by Russian-speaking parents, studied according to the Russian educational programs and have direct national, cultural and religious ties with the great Russia. Children from Donbass have not been ‘adopted’ in Russia – it was and is prohibited still. Only patronage (trusteeship) is permitted, and even for a limited period of time: by the time they reach 18 years, but no more].

But "according to the Yale Lab," Grayzone journalist Jeremy Loffredo explained in a new video report, the outrageous allegations of war crimes on the part of the Russian President were based on simple Google searches, involved "zero interviews with actual victims… [and] the researchers didn’t even attempt to see any of the camps in person."

[MY COMMENT: The figure of so many children from Donbass, like ‘6,000’, have been relocated to Russia? What about to the Western Europe, has not been confirmed by any independent source. This figure has been invented by the Ukrainian Special Security Services and current Presidential Office. So far 15 children from Donbass have returned to their eight families they originated from. There are no other requests from the Ukrainian side who, instead of maintaining normal connections with the Russian ombudspersons or Commissioners for Children’s Rights, imposed various sanctions against 28 of them. How Kiev can communicate with them? That is nearly one third of their total national list. Is it a proper method to resolve the issue?].

Now the Grayzone has unveiled never-before-seen footage, captured by Jeremy Loffredo in Russia last year, showing the alleged "re-education" camps – and they’re nothing like what the State Department claims. ICC arrest warrant for Putin based on State Department-funded report that debunked itself.

Watch please @loffredojeremy's video report from inside a Russian youth program the ICC called a "re-education camp" named “Inside a Russian youth camp condemned by the ICC”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDS1OSEIoz8

Although the Yale researchers and the International Criminal Court "are probably under the impression that no Western journalist has been to these so-called ‘re-education camps,’" Loffredo explains in a video report, "that assumption would be wrong." Indeed, the journalist says, "I visited one of these camps four months ago – unaware that it would be so important to future war propaganda."

[MY COMMENT: By the way, the name of the place the children from Donbass were temporarily living, is actually called not the ‘camp’, but in reality ‘Dom otdikha Pokrovskoe’ in Russian or ‘The House for Rest named Pokrovskoe’ or ‘The Recreation House named Pokrovskoe’’ if translated into English; Pokrovskoe is the name of the geographic location].

Loffredo explained with his co-author, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, that he found "a hotel full of happy campers receiving free classical music lessons in their native Russian language from first-class instructors." Look at the list of facilities shown in the video that this hotel has: a dancing hall, a conference hall, pizzeria, swimming pool, etc.

Loffredo interviewed one of the camp’s instructors, violin teacher Peter Lundstrom, who said that many of the 80 children from the Donetsk and Lugansk region who came to the music ‘camp’ had first-hand experience with the war that’s been raging in the backyard for over nine years: "Some of them lost their relatives and friends," he noted. "In the conflict zone [MY COMMENT: in the aggression zone created by AFU nearly 9 years ago], they cannot continue their professional music studies."

In a subsequent interview with the Grayzone, HRL’s executive director admitted the camps were actually less Third Reich and more "teddy bear." In other words, the lead author of the report used to justify an ICC arrest warrant for the Russian president seemed to acknowledge that the kids aren’t being stolen, but are merely being given respite from the trauma of life in a conflict zone or a zone of Ukrainian/NATO aggression..

Detailing his findings in comments given to Sputnik News, Blumenthal said their report "completely demolishes the entire case" against the Russian President and "exposes it as a public relations stunt that is driven by a hyper-politicized [ICC] prosecutor captured by the US and a State Department-funded report."

Between Loffredo’s trip to one of the ‘camps’ in question, the original text of the report at the center of the allegations, and the Grayzone’s interview with the director of the group which authored it, Blumenthal says the "three layers of journalistic inquiry" totally debunk "the allegation by the ICC… that Russia is running a network of camps that are holding children as hostages and committing a war crime by illegally deporting Ukrainian children." [MY CORRECTION: Russian children from Russian territory to Russia].

But despite the groundbreaking nature of their findings, Blumenthal said that not a single mainstream media has reached out to him in the 24 hours since publishing the report: "Western media is doing all it can to ignore this devastating debunking of the Yale HRL report that inspired the ICC arrest warrant," he noted.

But this shouldn’t as a surprise, the award-winning journalist says, because mainstreams outlets are seeking to "prevent the populations of countries whose governments are sponsoring this proxy war from learning the truth – which is that this is a politicized warrant driven by a bogus investigation that relied on no field research, whose own report debunks itself."

I would add:

and in order to hide all atrocities incited and financed by the USA and NATO plus implemented by AFU and conducted by the Kiev regime against civilians, including against children.  The motto of ‘relocated children of Donbass’ was invented specifically to camouflage such atrocities and genocide.

NOBODY WILL FORGET IT.                                                                                                       

Note: Two PPT slides are send separately

Written by Vladimir P. Kozin