Beyond Genocide, Ethnocide and Identicide: Russia's ‘Strategic Imperial Demographic Policy’ of Russifying Ukrainian Children

Date

2025-01-01

Author

Aydıngün, Ayşegül
Morkva, Valeriy
Aydıngün, İsmail

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

276
views

307
downloads

Cite This

Following the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, thousands of Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken from occupied territories and transferred to Russia. On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court officially recognized these actions as a war crime. Based on extensive documentary research as well as visual materials, this article argues that the Russian Federation is executing a systematic policy of child abduction. Frame analysis is used to understand the rationale behind the actions and narratives of both Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The discussion critically examines the applicability and limitations of terms such as genocide, ethnocide and identicide, contending that the phenomenon in question transcends these conceptual categories. Instead, the article proposes defining this forced transfer of Ukrainian children as a ‘strategic imperial demographic policy’.

Subject Keywords

forcibly deported children, Russian-Ukrainian war, russification, strategic imperial demographic policy, Ukraine

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105013273076&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115934

Collections

Department of Sociology, Article