'Dear Mr Trump: won't you think of the children?'

Children matter a lot to the men who have come to power. Donald Trump surrounds himself with his family, grants them jobs, business opportunities, informal ambassadorial roles. Vladimir Putin has sought to stamp out birth control and made it illegal to "spread information" about being child-free. And Elon Musk is trying to create the world's first economy based entirely on his personal emissions, powered by child support payments from Musk Enterprises, Inc.

So you'd think they'd care that children aren't with their parents. That they're not at school. They're being groomed to provide future generations, taxation and economic benefit to a country where they are - gasp - illegal immigrants, which all three of them are very against. Yet what the men in power seem to have decided is that kidnap, genocide and illegal immigration is all absolutely fine, if it is one of the men in power that does it.

Some of the children were pupils, tricked into boarding buses with parental approval for school trips to Crimea and Donbas from which they never returned. Others were in children's homes, not orphans but with families that were struggling. Others were simply grabbed from streets and basements, as battles raged, adults fled, and millions were displaced. There were reports that as families of Ukrainian refugees approached checkpoints, parents were sent one way and children another, and were never reunited. The United Nations has managed to confirm the identities of 19,000 children who should be in Ukraine, but are now instead in Russia. There are reports the total number missing could be 10 times that, at around 238,000.

It's not a secret. It began in 2014, four years before the invasion, when Putin annexed Crimea. He passed laws making it illegal for other nations to adopt a Russian child without state approval, and made it possible for Russia to do exactly that without Ukrainian agreement. In 2022 officials announced the arrival of Ukrainian children on Russian planes, payments were offered to Russians to adopt them, and the Russian children's commissioner said she'd done so herself.

At first the children claimed to be Ukrainian, but after months of being told their parents had abandoned them, "patriotic re-education camps" and a change of name, some expressed love - at least to officials - for their new families and passports. It is inevitable that some of those homes will not be as caring as they could or should be. Later that year, Sky News showed footage of orphanage officials hiding children from Russian soldiers, who then seized records to help track them down anyway.

In 2023, the BBC reported that 48 children went missing from a Kherson children's home, including a 10-month-old called Margarita. Russian MPs were filmed loading children onto buses. A 70-year-old Putin official was later officially named as her adoptive father. Some children have found a way home, telling stories of propaganda and mistreatment. Last year, Ukraine and Canada launched an international coalition for the return of its children, with 37 other countries. Among them is the United States of America, whose leader has ordered the world to make peace without once making it conditional on those children finding a peace of their own.

And so here we are, with the big boys at the top table insisting they're right about everything even if everyone else thinks they're wrong, and not one journalist who's had a chance at press conferences has asked Trump, Musk, Putin, Emmanuel Macron or Keir Starmer whether taking and keeping those children is in the growing list of atrocious things that they're absolutely fine with. Consequently, many of those reading this may have forgotten about it. The daily explosions of news in the era of Trump v2.0 tend to drown out everything else, so it's understandable. But without public awareness politicians don't discuss it, the media have no reason to reheat what they've previously reported, and the big boys just carry on regardless.

Some of those children may be having a better time of it with good adoptive parents, and see no point in returning to Ukraine. But many will be experiencing the opposite, and in any event removing future generations that could help rebuild a country only promotes economic decline and more fighting. That's why Putin did it. He's not Santa Claus, he's using children as a weapon of war to undermine his enemy.

If Trump, Starmer, you and I and everyone else forget that fact then we are as guilty as he, for we are letting him get away with it. If you hate illegal immigration, if you revere the family unit, if you fear depopulation, if you buy into every Far Right trope going, you're a hypocrite. If you are a hand-wringing liberal, or someone who believes the rule of law to be paramount, or if you are just of the opinion that if we are the good guys then that means NOT acting like bad guys, then you are a hypocrite. If we do not bang the drum for those children every day from now until the day they have a right to return, then we are authorising kidnap and abuse. And regardless of whatever deal gets done - unless those children are part of it, there will always be a mother on the warpath.