On Thursday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be sitting face-to-face across from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during a visit to Washington, D.C., that includes meetings with President Joe Biden, most U.S. senators, and a few House members, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
McCarthy will have a chance to demonstrate just how much he cares about important things like child trafficking on a massive scale as carried out by Russia at a time when the pro-Putin wing of the GOP is throwing up obstacles to provide $24 billion in new military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine proposed by Biden. But it doesn’t sound like he’s going to make it easy.
QAnon conspiracists supposedly are devoted to stopping child trafficking, but only in their fictional world. As The Guardian wrote, They believe that “national Democrats, aided by Hollywood and a group of `global elites,’ are running a massive ring devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children, all with the purpose of fulfilling the rituals of their Satanic faith.”
Conservatives flocked to see the film “Sound of Freedom” in which QAnon supporter Jim Caviezel played the role of Tim Ballard, then head of the Utah-based organization Operation Underground Railroad, which claims to carry out undercover missions abroad to rescue kidnapped children from slavery. Never mind that Ballard quietly resigned as head of OUR after allegations surfaced that he coerced at least seven women to act like “wives” while on overseas missions. So how will the cowardly McCarthy respond when he meets a real hero in Zelenskyy, who will surely bring up the topic of Putin’s mass-scale kidnapping of Ukrainian children?
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On Tuesday, when asked about renewed funding for Ukraine, McCarthy said he has “questions” for Zelenskyy, namely about accountability for the money the U.S. has already spent and about Ukraine’s plan for victory. He did at least concede that what Russia has done in Ukraine is an “atrocity.” That’s not very reassuring.
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"Is Zelenskyy elected to Congress? Is he our president? I don't think I have to commit anything and I think I have questions for him,” McCarthy told ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott.
In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. The warrant for Putin stated:
Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. … The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022.”
In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Zelenskyy warned U.N. members of the dangers of not standing up to aggression, citing the risks posed by Russia’s weaponization of food and energy. He also mentioned what Russia has done to Ukrainian children in the occupied territories. Zelenskyy said:
“Unfortunately, various terrorist groups abduct children to put pressure on their families and societies. But never before the mass kidnapping and deportation would become a part of the government policy. Not until now.
“We know the names of tens of thousands of children and have evidence on hundreds of thousands of others kidnapped by Russia in the occupied territories of Ukraine and later deported. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrant for Putin for this crime.
“We are trying to get children back home but time goes by. What will happen to them? Those children in Russia are taught to hate Ukraine, and all ties with their families are broken… This is clearly a genocide.”
Earlier Tuesday, Biden told the United Nations General Assembly that “Russia alone bears responsibility for this war” and “it is Russia alone that stands in the way of peace, because ... Russia’s price for peace is Ukraine’s capitulation, Ukraine’s territory, and Ukraine’s children.”
”Russia believes that the world will grow weary and allow it to brutalize Ukraine without consequence.
But I ask you this: If we abandon the core principles of the [U.N. Charter] to appease an aggressor, can any member state in this body feel confident that they are protected? If we allow Ukraine to be carved up, is the independence of any nation secure?”
Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, speaking on the sidelines of the General Assembly, said more than 19,000 Ukrainian children had been forcibly transferred or deported to Russia or occupied Ukrainian territories, Al Jazeera reported. So far only 386 have returned home, according to the Ukrainian government.
In Russia, “they were told that their parents don’t need them, that their country doesn’t need them, that nobody is waiting for them,” Zelenska said.
“The abducted children were told that they are no longer Ukrainian children, that they are Russian children.”
A new concern surfaced recently when reports emerged that nearly 50 Ukrainian children who had been illegally deported to Russia from occupied territories have arrived in Belarus, The Guardian reported.
Belarusian opposition figures in June gave the International Criminal Court materials that they claimed showed that more than 2,100 Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied cities had been forcibly removed to Belarus, The Guardian reported. Pavel Latushka, a former Belarusian culture minister, told The Guardian that he hopes the material will lead the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close Putin ally.
And the Defense One website reported that a federal government shutdown could reduce the flow of weapons already committed to Ukraine at a time when the Ukrainian military is engaged in a major counteroffensive to liberate its territory. That’s because a small group of State Department workers is needed to approve arms transfers and arrange weapons contracts.
”This is something we would like to avoid,” said State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Mira Resnick, speaking at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday.
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