‘Your Parents Don’t Want You—but Russia Does’

‘Your Parents Don’t Want You—but Russia Does’
“Your parents didn’t want you.” This is what 15-year-old Lisa was told by her guards after she and her classmates were taken from their school in Kherson, Ukraine, in September 2022 and relocated to the Druzhba camp in Russia-controlled Crimea.
Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine had erupted seven months earlier. Druzhba was one of many camps where the Russians were holding Ukrainian children. Many of them were orphans, often because their parents had been killed by Russian troops. Others, like Lisa, still had family members who longed to be reunited with them. But they were often lied to by their captors: They were told that their parents were either dead, too poor and incompetent to get them back, or just uninterested in reclaiming them.
But Russia had a plan for them.
In a 2024 interview with Valasz Online, Lisa said she was held in Druzhba for two months with about a thousand other Ukrainian teenagers. From there she was transferred to a camp in Luchistyy, then to another in Henichesk. In these facilities, she was forbidden to speak Ukrainian and had to attend mandatory classes she called “Russian patriotic lessons.” These Ukrainian child captives were frequently made to sing the national anthem of their captors.
“My mother didn’t know where I had ended up,” Lisa said. But after eight months of separation and an arduous search aided by a Ukrainian humanitarian organization, her mother found her. “I ran to her and hugged her. Everyone was shocked that she had made it that far,” she said.
Lisa escaped from this Russian system. The outcome for her family was beautiful—but rare. The children she left behind “became pro-Russian,” she said, “especially if they had got there as orphans, even though they had been pro-Ukrainian. They had no choice. Only one point of view is allowed there.”
This horrifying reality is darkening the future of so many children.
But there are organizations, such as the one that helped Lisa’s mother rescue her, that are doing all they can to save children from this mass kidnapping and mass brainwashing effort. One of them is the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, whose chairwoman, Daria Kasyanova, spoke to the Trumpet in a May 14 interview.
‘Crimes Against Our Children’
Russia is carrying out “crimes against our children,” Kasyanova said, crimes against the most vulnerable, those often unable to fully grasp what’s happening, much less fight back.
The Ukrainian Child Rights Network tries to fight for them. It coordinates several groups that are working to bring Russian-kidnapped children back home and reunite them with their families or find them adoptive families.
Kasyanova said, “We would like that all Ukrainian children live in families, in the safety of families—not in institutions.”
As interminable as the war itself has been, the task of saving the numerous kidnap victims is sure to outlast it. Even if the war ended tomorrow, she said, the effort to repatriate stolen children would still take “years and years.”
And the war won’t end tomorrow.
Kasyanova fears that Ukraine—war-torn and brutalized—cannot save the children without “real actions” from “European governments and European people who understand the scope of this crime of Russia.”
Whether or not more outside help arrives, Kasyanova says the Ukrainian Child Rights Network remains “determined to continue to do everything possible … to find these children and return these children back.”
Their goal is among the most noble a humanitarian organization could have. But it is proving extremely difficult because the Russians are determined to continue the war, to escalate the war, to keep the children they have taken, and to take as many more as possible.
This Russian mass-kidnapping is wicked to the core. But it makes sense to the Russians.
Russia Needs More Russians
Russia’s territory, the largest on Earth, is abundant in oil, natural gas, coal, timber, nickel, palladium and numerous other natural resources. But there is one resource Russia sorely lacks: people. In 2024, its official population was 146.1 million, down a stunning 17 million from its peak in the early 1990s. There are fewer than nine people per square kilometer.
The population crisis is partly because Russia’s rates of drug and alcohol abuse are stratospheric, with tens of thousands of deaths per year. The nation also has one of the world’s highest hiv rates, which kills tens of thousands more. Russians legally abort around 480 babies for every 1,000 live births, which is 21/2 times higher than the United States’ rate and considered by some the world’s highest abortion rate. Tens of thousands of Russians have died every year since Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine. Meanwhile, more than 100,000 affluent Russians emigrate to other countries each year.
Russia’s birthrate last year was only 1.22 per woman—barely over half the 2.1 births per woman needed to keep a population stable. And the shrinkage is accelerating: Russia’s national statistics agency reported 195,400 children born in January and February of this year, 3 percent lower than the equivalent period last year.
All this is assuming that Russia’s official statistics are honest; serious analysts believe the government fluffs the data to make its demographic crisis look less severe.
President Vladimir Putin has publicly lamented his nation’s demographic crisis on several occasions. He has urged his people to reverse it. He declared 2024 to be “the year of the family.” He specifically addressed Russia’s potential mothers, saying, “Dear women, you certainly have the power to improve this world with your beauty, wisdom and generosity, but above all, thanks to the greatest gift that nature has endowed you with, the bearing of children.” Putin has provided financial incentives for procreation and passed laws designed to curb voluntary childlessness.
None of this has slowed the decline. Deaths and emigration keep soaring, and babies keep vanishing into history.
This persistent demographic crisis is one of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine, first seizing and annexing Crimea in 2014, then expanding his incursions into Ukraine in a full-scale attack in 2022. With the Crimea annexation, he added some 2.4 million people to Russia’s population. With his ongoing invasion and mass kidnappings, he hopes to add millions more.
“The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories,” economist Nicholas Eberstadt told the Wall Street Journal last year.

The Ukrainian government recognizes 19,546 “reports of unlawful deportations and forced transfers of children” from Ukraine’s eastern regions. But the true number of stolen children is far higher.
“The true number of deported children is near-impossible to verify,” the Institute for the Study of War think tank stated in March, “but the implications remain the same: Russia has stolen tens—potentially hundreds—of thousands of Ukrainian children with the explicit intent of eradicating their Ukrainian identities and turning them into Russians.”
Russian troops invade an area, destroying targets and causing collateral damage, and dispersing, wounding or killing Ukrainian troops and inhabitants. There in the smoking ruins of what once were homes, farms, apartments, stores, stations and schools, the Russians find—or seek out—the children. They take them—surely oftentimes drag them—to their vehicles, and all that they have known, including their brothers, sisters and parents, disappear into the distance.
Miles in vehicles and trains later, and stranger upon stranger later, the child arrives at Druzhba or one of the numerous children’s camps the Russians operate. Portugal’s Hala Systems used satellite imagery and both Ukrainian and Russian sources to compile maps of 136 schools, hotels, hospitals and summer camps in Russia, occupied Ukraine and Belarus that are operating as mass-kidnapping camps. Some are deep in Russia, closer to Central Asia than Eastern Europe. One facility is in the city of Novosibirsk in central Siberia.
The aim of these various reeducation centers is to keep Ukrainian children from being found and rescued—and to begin erasing the children’s Ukrainian identity and assimilating them into Russian culture.
“We were allowed outside for just 5 to 10 minutes, always under the watchful eye of a guard,” Artem, a rescued Ukrainian teenager, recounted. “Every time I spoke in Ukrainian, they told me to switch to Russian, but I kept speaking Ukrainian. … [W]e were forced to wear Russian uniforms when high-ranking soldiers visited. Each morning, they handed us the lyrics of the Russian anthem and made us sing it.”
From the camps, the children are placed into a Russian foster family or, as is more common with older children, an institution run by the government. Many are fast-tracked into military service. An investigation by Russian-language news organizations Verstka and iStories published in April 2024 found that many of the older kidnapped children are now wards of the Russian state and attending a cadet school in the nation’s Saratov region. There they are trained for war.
The early war training is not just for teenagers. “We have seen some children as young as 8 that are being sent into very structured military patriotic programs,” said Ashley Jordana, director of law, policy and human rights at Hala Systems.
This is perverse beyond words. But it is a crucial part of Putin’s planning for future military conquests.
Future Wars Need Soldiers
Ukraine is not the only nation Putin wishes to conquer. Early in his reign he called the Soviet Union’s collapse the 20th century’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe.” Ever since, he has actively worked to reverse that “catastrophe” by retaking the former Soviet nations of Georgia, Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine.
He has more to accomplish in those countries, and he also has his eye on the Baltic nations, the Caucasus, Central Asia and parts of Poland and Romania. Putin and his comrades in the Kremlin believe they need control over these neighboring territories to make Russia great and to withstand—and make—strategic threats. And they understand they will not be able to win the future wars over those far-flung lands with an army of a few hundred thousand 80-year-old soldiers.
This is why they take Ukrainian children.

If Russia prevails in this horrendous war, many Ukrainians—possibly millions—are likely to be “Russified,” trained and welded into the Russian war machine. They will then take their turn, perpetuating this same cycle, conquering more people from other countries so Putin’s forces continue growing, so that still more countries can be attacked.
This is Putin’s grotesque plan.
If this sounds like a dark fiction, just look a little closer at some of the Russian troops doing the bombing, shelling, shooting, killing and kidnapping. Many are Chechen men. When they were children, their nation was independent and rabidly anti-Russia. But Russia waged two brutal wars against them in the 1990s and 2000s. Those wars killed more than 100,000 Chechen people and ended with Chechnya becoming part of the Russian Federation. Now, these Chechen children are adults. Many are soldiers fighting alongside the Russian forces their fathers fought against. They have been absorbed, assimilated and Russified, and are helping Russia do to Ukraine what was done to their nation a generation ago. And if Putin’s plans succeed, children from eastern Ukraine will grow up to fight against those from western Ukraine and other nations he targets.
Back in 2004, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry sounded the alarm about Putin’s dictatorial ambitions. He highlighted Putin’s links to his infamous predecessor in the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin. In 2008, Mr. Flurry again likened some aspects of Putin’s leadership to those of Stalin. Then in his 2017 booklet The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia,’ his comparisons are incisive: “Putin has a long pattern of diabolical evil on the level of Joseph Stalin. An abundance of fruits prove that. … No leader in Russia has equaled Putin’s diabolical evil since Joseph Stalin.”
To many, comparing Putin to Stalin back in 2004 and 2008 would have seemed alarmist. Even in 2017, it may have sounded extreme. Stalin is by most estimates the second-biggest mass murderer in history (after China’s Mao Zedong), responsible for an estimated 20 million deaths. Millions of those resulted from a man-made famine engineered in the 1930s called the “Holodomor.” He did it to stop people who wanted freedom from Russia. Those people were Ukrainians.
In 2025, it is hard to look at what Putin is doing in Ukraine—prolonged invasion, mass kidnappings, brainwashing of children—and not think of Stalin. Perhaps it is fitting then that the International Criminal Court in 2023, on the merits of erasing an ethnic identity, recognized Putin’s mass kidnapping as genocide.
‘Prince’ of Russia Was Prophesied
Vladimir Putin is reshaping the global landscape and turning life into a waking nightmare for millions. This takes on deep significance when studied through the lens of Bible prophecy.
In the September 2014 Trumpet, Mr. Flurry wrote: “We need to watch Vladimir Putin closely. He is the ‘prince of Rosh’ that God inspired Ezekiel to write about 2,500 years ago!”
Mr. Flurry’s article dissects Bible passages about an alliance of Asian nations that will amass in the near future a combined army of 200 million soldiers (Revelation 9:16; 16:12). He calls particular attention to Ezekiel 38:2, which says this gargantuan army will be led by a figure called “the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” (New King James Version).
Meshech and Tubal are archaic names for the modern Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk. Rosh is a variant of Rus, an ancient name for Russia. These identities are affirmed by several reference books, including the Benson Commentary on the Old and New Testaments and the Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary.
The book of Ezekiel paints a grim picture of the future military exploits executed by this Asian powerhouse, led by the “prince of Rosh.” Putting these prophecies alongside Putin’s track record of belligerence and evil, Mr. Flurry wrote in his 2014 article: “I strongly believe Vladimir Putin is going to lead the 200 million-man army. Just look at the power he already has. Can you think of any other Russian politician who could become so powerful and have the will to lead Russia into the crisis of crises? I see nobody else on the horizon who could do that.”
Ezekiel’s description of “the prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal” has important meaning. “The use of all three names shows that this is an individual ruler of all the peoples of Russia, from the west to the east,” Mr. Flurry writes in The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia.’ “The reference to the cities of Moscow and Tobolsk helps us see how vast Russian territory is in these latter days. This giant swath of land indicates the prince will probably conquer more nations of the former Soviet Union.”
Mr. Flurry wrote this in 2017, years before the invasion of Ukraine. We are seeing this prediction being fulfilled in eastern Ukraine right now. Yet though Putin hasn’t taken all of Ukraine’s territory, he is working to take Ukraine’s people. This includes kidnapping thousands of children and brainwashing them to love their wicked kidnapper. This is, as Mr. Flurry put it, “diabolical evil on the level of Joseph Stalin.”
Scriptures show that Putin’s army will soon be many times larger than any ever assembled in mankind’s bloodstained history. Most of the soldiers will come from countries that band together with Russia under Putin’s rule, such as China. But Putin’s campaigns to conquer countries such as Ukraine and steal their children will also help the force achieve its staggering prophesied size.
Some terribly dark years are coming for Russia, Ukraine and the whole world. But in The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia,’ Mr. Flurry emphasizes that the approaching era of war, darkness and suffering will not last long, and it will be followed by a serene future.
“Vladimir Putin is a sign, literally a sign that Jesus Christ is about to return! This is one of the most inspiring messages in the Bible,” he writes. “What we are seeing in Russia ultimately leads to the transition from man ruling man to God ruling man! … A great transition is about to occur.”
The same Bible that forewarned us of the vast evil that Putin’s Russia is committing and will increasingly commit also tells us that after the unprecedented violence, there will be unprecedented peace. There will be overflowing peace for the children and people of all ages in Ukraine, Russia and nations of all the world.