Post Manipulating Von der Leyen’s Statement and Praising Putin for Preventing “Perverse Pedophile Plans”

The statement of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen that a conference for returning Ukrainian children from Russia will be organized, is manipulated in the Facebook post we are reviewing. It twists the theses and praises the Russian President Vladimir Putin. The claim that Putin ruined the “perverse pedophile plans” regarding Ukrainian children, distorts the actual outlook of the problem with the deportation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to Russia. Ten days ago, the International Criminal Court in The Hague accused Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova for war crimes due to the deportation of the Ukrainian children.

We are fact-checking a post published on the social media Facebook saying:

The pedophiles will eat their hearts out because Putin destroyed their perverse pedophile plans with the children!!!

In the post, an article is shared reporting that the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen announced the organization of a conference on the return of the Ukrainian children taken to Russia during the war. The article informs that Leyen, in partnership with Kyiv, and together with the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki initiated the repatriation of the children taken to Russia by force.

Therefore, we will organize a conference. We want to exert international pressure and take all possible measure to find these children, Von Der Leyen pointed out.

The description of the post we are fact-checking, however, turns this ordinary information, simply a quote of the statement of the President of the European Commission given at the end of the first day of the two-day EU Summit in Brussels, into a manipulative construction by twisting the theses and praising the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

First, it is important to explain the context of the rhetoric: ”pedophiles will eat their hearts out because Putin killed their perverse pedophile plans with the children”, that originates from QAnon conspiracy theory, also popular in context of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.

Bellingcat, analyzing QAnon’s channels, said:

Another common theme across multiple global QAnon channels is Putin’s fight against “pedophiles”. For example, in September 2021, the QAnon channel from the Netherlands reported that The Netherlands is “pedoland” and that Putin is aware of that, thereby sharing a video where Putin says that there is a political party in the Netherlands that supports pedophilia. This video was posted on YouTube in 2014 with Dutch translation and has more than 100k views so far.

Bellingcat adds that in September 2021, a QAnon channel from the United Kingdom claimed:

Since coming into power, Putin is fighting the deep state satanic cabal, therefore global media declared Russia and its president the “bad guys”.

Ten days ago, the International Criminal Court in The Hague acussed Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of Russia for war crimes due to the deportation of Ukrainian children.

As specified by the Guardian, the reports that emerged last Spring indicate that children from occupied Ukrainian territories were taken to Russia and are adopted by Russian families. Russia presents these actions as humanitarian missions to save Ukrainian children from the war, but Ukraine accuses Russia of genocide describing these actions as war crimes.

Among the kidnapped children are those taken from Ukrainian state institutions from the occupied territories, children whose parents had sent them to Russian-run “summer camps” from which they never returned, children whose parents were arrested by the Russian occupying authorities, and children who were orphaned by the fighting.

The vast majority of Ukrainian children are from occupied areas of Southern and Eastern Ukraine: Kherson region, Kharkiv region, Zaporozhye region, Donetsk and Luhansk region, as well as a small area of Mykolaiv region.

Russia has admitted to holding at least 1,400 Ukrainian children it describes as orphans, though it said at least 2,000 had travelled to Russia unaccompanied.

Since the invasion, at least 400 Ukrainian orphans have been adopted by Russian families, according to the Ukrainian Regional Center for Human Rights, which has calculated its figure from statements by the Russian State. Russia has said that 1,000 more are waiting to be adopted.

But, many of these children from Ukraine have living relatives who are often desperately searching for them, Guardian writes.

What are the re-education summer camps?

At least 6,000 Ukrainian children in the occupied areas attended Russian state-funded summer camps and several hundred of them have not been returned to their families. Yale University described these camps are “re-education” camps in a study from February.

Since the start of the conflict a year ago, children as young as four months who were living in the occupied areas have been taken to 43 camps across Russia, including in Moscow-annexed Crimea and Siberia, for “pro-Russian patriotic and military-related education”, reports the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.

Some parents have managed to retrieve their children by making the long journey from Ukraine through Poland, and the Baltics, down to Southern Russia, Guardian writes.

The UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide prohibits forcible transfer of children from one group to another, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Children prohibits “illegal transfer and refusal to return children”.

Therefore, the situation when a conference is organized by the European bodies for the return of Ukrainian children to Ukraine, has nothing to do with pedophilia on the part of the EU or the European Commission or its representatives, but it refers to the illegal deportation of the Ukrainian children.

Due to all the facts noted, we believe that the post claiming that Putin“ruined perverse pedophile plans” with Ukrainian children, is manipulative and distorts the actual outlook of the problem related to the deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied areas to Russia.

 

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This article was developed within the framework of the project Promoting Access to Reliable News to Counter Disinformation, implemented by the Metamorphosis Foundation. The article, that was previously published on the Macedonian-language version of Truthmeter, was enabled with the support of the American non-profit foundation NED (National Endowment for Democracy). The contents of the article is the responsibility of the author and do not always reflect the positions of Metamorphosis Foundation, NED or their partners.

 

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