I wanted to let you all know you should read this article about how Russia is stealing Ukrainian kids and sending them into Russia to get their names changed and get adopted by Russian people loyal to Putin’s regime.
Every time a war or natural disaster breaks out, people say things like “the poor orphaned kids, I wish I could adopt them” but there are very good reasons not to. To begin with, many of the “orphans” are not orphans at all, but just temporarily separated from their families due to the chaos that results from wars and natural disasters, and it’ll take awhile to sort out who is even eligible for adoption. A lot of orphans are taken in by members of their extended family, and it’s usually better for them if that happens than if they are adopted by strangers. Also, those who are indeed orphaned and eligible for adoption are much better off being adopted by people from their country and their culture.
For an invading country to take away the available children and send them off for adoption by others — as Russia is doing here with Ukrainian children — is actually an act of genocide. If you go to this United Nations link and scroll down, you’ll find the legal definition of the genocide according to them and it says it’s genocide if there’s “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” including “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The Nazis did the same thing during World War II, stealing the most attractive babies and little kids from their families in Eastern Europe and sending them to Germany to be raised by Nazi families. It was wrong then and it’s just as wrong now.
As the Reuters article says:
The deportations have come at an enormous human cost: siblings have been divided, vulnerable youths have been turned against each other, and preschool children – with no blood relatives to claim them – have been hidden from view in Russian-held territory. Returning these children is an arduous task, volunteers and officials in Ukraine say, and the job gets harder with every day that passes, as the children get older, and are more exposed to Russian influence.
Unfortunately a site like the Charley Project can’t do much about such state-sponsored disappearances. But it’s a great article.
The Charley Project Blog 
We adopted our daughter at age eleven months from Russia. She had no extended family who wanted her. It was required that a birth family search be conducted before we could even go to court. This took over a month and no one stepped forward. It was agonizing for us to wait to see if anyone claimed her.
Her birth mother was a homeless, registered alcoholic.who legally gave her up at the maternity hospital. We have her name, age, passport number, documents she signed and other various trivial bits of information. We also have the name of another child she had who had died before she gave birth to our daughter.
The problem with your statement that children are better off being raised in their own culture is that adoption is not a popular option in Russia and many other countries among the native citizens. Most children are not adopted by Russians but by other citizens of the world. Additionally, our daughter was in an orphanage with many children who were not available to adopt as they had parents whp were too poor to keep them but had the government caring for them. We met a woman who was there visiting her son. I assure you..no children were stolen or kidnapped
It was all very ethical and legal.
So please educate yourself on the truth about adoption and kindly quit repeating adoption stories that are isolated and definitely not the norm.
I’m not talking about that kind of adoption, I am talking about children (most of whom have parents and other relatives) being stolen from a war zone by an occupying country. Not Russian children. Ukrainians being stolen by Russians and forced to become Russian. I don’t know why you’re telling me about your kid’s adoption because that’s clearly a much different case than if she had been stolen.
It makes me scream!