#Russia “patriotic” Telegram channels started a mass-scale campaign distributing alleged screenshots from darknet with advertisements to sell children from #Ukraine for paedophiles and as forced donors of human organs.
Both narratives have been pushed for years in #Russia but it seems to be one of the first such major campaigns targeted abroad, as I have received these screenshots from a contact in Russia and at the same time found it e.g. on Arabic Facebook[^1].
It’s not that paedophile rings do not operate in #Ukraine, they do and they are being busted by Ukrainian police even at war time.[^2] In Russia paedophile rings have reached to the level of regional Duma, where two councillors were arrested in Astrakhan in 2019 for “for sexually abusing, raping, and filming children”.[^3] and EU specialised police departments have been busting paedophile rings on regular basis.[^4]
The current Russian campaign however is not about busting any of these rings, assuming these announcements are genuine as they could be trivially faked. It’s about continued dehumanising Ukrainians in order to make mass-scale war-crimes acceptable or even welcome for Russian audience. Russian media routinely use dehumanising language, speaking of “filth”, “pest”, “worms”, playing on the lowest emotions and presenting itself as the only morally solid party, entitled to “purge” these. If that sounds familiar to Third Reich narratives used to instigate hate against Jews, it’s because both echoed earlier Soviet propaganda used against “bourgeois”, “kulaks” (including Jews) alike.
[^3]: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/02/06/78-separate-incidents
[^4]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57735317
