Transcription
Today's video is a little bit more serious. So, if you're not interested in that, then feel free to scroll on. But if you are, then stick around.
Whatever, I've covered stuff like the Boeing thing before, and other serious things as well. So, it's not alien for the channel, but it's also not aliens for the channel. So, it's like, you know, some people like the, the fun. So, yeah, little warning.
But also, there's always things going on in the world, and it's important to know. This big globe of ours, it's huge. Thousands of things are happening every single day. Trials, tribulations. If you don't think we're on a globe, then in between the big ice wall, there's always things happening. And there has been for a very long time. For humanity, famines, natural disasters, diseases, war, politics, Minnesota. There's been a lot that's happened over the last few years.
And sort of a central point of all of this is the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. The initial strikes that we think we're hearing right now, right out of the Russian playbook, would be cruise missiles to take out things like surface-to-air missile systems, air defense, uh, systems that the Ukrainians would have. That would clear the path for waves of bombers and attack aircraft to continue to hit things like, uh, power plants, command and control, uh, internet command centers.
This happened after about a decade of back and forth conflict. Russian troops spreading out throughout the, uh, strategic Crimean Peninsula. President Obama speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently pulling no punches. Although it is unclear what the White House can really do about all of this. There is tons of media coverage, so, so much drone footage. This is the first time the entire world has been able to see a battlefield in a way that has never been seen before. FPV drones, just people dying constantly. Like, I can't scroll on Twitter. I mean, imagine my privilege. I can't even scroll on Twitter without seeing a war crime. War crimes. A lot of them. Tons of human rights violations.
We're seeing the reality, though, which has caused there to be even more attention to the war. So, it makes you wonder what has gone on behind closed doors since the beginning of time with all this stuff. Now we have drones and body cams and live streaming and all this. Something can happen in Ukraine and I see it on my feed in Texas. An hour later. Anyways, I digress.
A lot of you may think that this conflict began in the 2010s, but you'd be entirely wrong. It goes way back. A long, long, long, long way back. Have you ever heard of Joseph Stalin and the USSR? How about the Holodomor? How about that? Have you ever read the book Red Famine? There was widespread suffering. Any livestock that remains was led away or slaughtered. Even pets, including cats, cats and dogs were killed for food or killed and then confiscated. The suffering soon turned to dying to the point where even being alive was reason for suspicion. If no one in a family had died, that meant the family had food, and they were harassed by local party activists for it. Well, that's what we're going to be talking about in today's video. Bit of history and also some modern consequences. And, you know, this never ended. This horrible travesty pretty much never ended.
And, you know, I want to see what you guys think about it. I want to see the comments down below. How much, you know, etc. I could be absolutely 100% off base in where I've gathered my information. I've just been gathering information. I'm going to try to be as factual as I can and not spread misinformation if possible. But once again, it's, it's difficult on the internet nowadays, especially when I only use Wikipedia as my source. Just kidding. I read the book Red Famine a couple years ago by Anne Applebaum and I've been wanting to talk about it on my channel for a long time, but it's just been so inappropriate. I used to do reaction videos and like gaming and how long can I this thing. Um, oh my God. Okay, not for very long, guys. Not for very long at all. I wonder how long I can hold this bomb for. And now I feel like I can start to talk about cool things. Well, not cool things. This is not cool at all. But cool, or let's say awesome in the sense of not being good, but being something that is just there and it's glaring and it's in, it's in history and there's nothing you can do about it and you should learn about it. You should know about it. That type of cool. That type of awesome. I probably should stop saying that, but I think you guys might know what I mean. This should be learned about, is what I'm saying. And who better to teach than me? Sorry, Frankie. Frankie's got allergies today, so she's going to be real quiet.
To approach this with a healthy amount of brevity and to remain as brief as I possibly can, in even a very long YouTube video, we'll start with deportation. Okay, that's sort of the beginning of most of this. It started in the 1920s, and there's been a long history of deportations in Russia.
In March of 1922, Joseph Stalin was appointed to General Secretary. And after Vladimir Lenin suffered a stroke and died in 1924, Stalin was quick to eliminate his competition and take Lenin's spot as the leader of the Soviet Union. Now, that's a whole thing in and of itself. A whole video. Revolutions. Oh, there's so much there. There's a lot of information. It's all so very interesting. If you guys think the CIA is crazy, how about the NKVD? The NKVD. There's so many layers to this. It's very, very scary, and most people don't know about it. I feel like I don't know. The best conversation I've ever had about it is to this camera right here.
So, as soon as Stalin took control of the Soviet Union, he began working on his new communist state. And one of the first things he began to do was implement a series of five-year plans, which were aimed at making the USSR better and more productive. The very first five-year plan was aimed at increasing economic productivity and efficiency. This plan was headed by the Gosplan, the State Planning Committee of the USSR, and later run by the Sovnarkom, which is the Council of People's Commissars. I'm going to say everything wrong unless I use a Russian accent. I don't know.
The first five-year plan involved the creation of collective farming, where all the peasants' property, crops, and livestock were given to the state. These collective farms operated like big plantations where multiple farmers work huge plots of land that were originally theirs, but were then melded together to make one big state-owned farm. Farmers would all have to gather and agree to the plan, or they would face dire consequences. And if you ever forgot what the plan was, there were boards in each town reminding you of your commitment to the USSR. The Brotherhood. The plan would begin in 1929 after the USSR had been dealing with a growing grain crisis.
And Stalin believed collectivization to be a good policy, probably the best policy, as he believed that he could win over the middle-class farmers, or kulaks, you may have heard of them, by offering access to mechanized equipment and credit, and threatening higher taxes and exile from their homelands if they refused. Stalin specifically targeted the kulaks because they were the wealthiest farmers and had the most political power over the majority of farmers in the region. So, that means if Stalin could intimidate, remove, or coerce these farmers to work with him, then the rest would follow. The kulaks.
This process would go into effect immediately and receive backlash from peasant farmers who were not willing to give up their land and tools that had been in their families for generations, which is, you know, totally reasonable. The dekulakization, as it was coined, upset many peasants and led to their resistance to the state. And resistance methods included the slaughter of livestock, riots, destruction of farm property, and the orders given by the Gosplan and Sovnarkom never being fulfilled. So, essentially, they just said, "You, we're not doing that. We're going to ignore you." As you could probably imagine, as a result of this very poorly executed plan, the dekulakization not only resulted in a major economic downturn due to the productive farmers being forcibly removed from their land, but it also resulted in a mass deportation of unwilling peasants to gulags and collective farms. So, forced labor, pretty much. I mean, let's be real, guys. Frankie, you're making a lot of snoring sounds. Can you stop, please? I don't know what this snoring thing is.
Specifically in Ukraine, the kulak population fell from 3.8% to 1.4% in the 1930s. And for more specific numbers, that would be about 63,600,20 people from the years 1930 to 1931. This obviously included children who were taken from their families, brought to Russian orphanages, and assimilated into Russian culture. And this is one of the earliest instances of Russian mass deportation. And this is pertinent to the overarching topic, collection of information in this video, because Russia is still doing that. I think CTV from an orphanage in occupied southern Ukraine, 400 miles away, shows chilling footage of Russian soldiers searching the building for Ukrainian children. Moscow has been accused of stealing over 19,000 Ukrainian children from war-torn areas like these and illegally deporting them to Russia. It's part of what could be one of the most egregious war crimes committed to date.
So, with this level of loss of labor and the large percentage of peasants just being unwilling to work, grain production, which was already plummeting, continued to plummet. And all of this caused a massive famine that later in time would be recognized as a genocide by Ukraine and the rest of the world and dubbed the Holodomor. Because it was like a choice, you know, similar to what Mao did in China with the Great Leap Forward. All these five-year plans and these initiatives and, wow, a lot of people die. Why does this keep happening?
So, then started the Holodomor, the genocide in Ukraine. And no one could have imagined how much worse things would actually get, and how many millions of people would die or be deported from their homelands. Entering the 1930s, Stalin was still having no luck with the kulaks and the peasants of Ukraine. They simply just didn't want to collectivize and give up their belongings to the state. Some kind of idea of Ukrainian nationalism or something like that. I'm not exactly sure. Can you blame them for not wanting to do that? For not wanting to give up all their to to Russia and Stalin? Or face gulags and and internment camps?
In light of the difficult nature of the Ukrainians at the time, something else began to loom in the back of Stalin's mind. The idea of potential Ukrainian secession. So, the kulaks and farmers in Ukraine resisted the USSR enough that it seemed like to Stalin and his people that a revolution, potentially this was a revolution, and subsequent secession was imminent. And if the USSR lost Ukraine, it would significantly worsen the nationwide grain shortage because Ukraine is incredibly fertile. And if you look at the rest of Russia, all the parts to the, the east, it's like not that, uh, they got a hole, I think that goes down to hell or something like that. And that's pretty much it.
So, with all that being said, Stalin came up with a set of rules to add on to his plans that would ultimately lead to the starvation of between 3.5 and 7 million people. On July 25th, 1932, Stalin proposed a law that called for measures to be taken to stop the embezzlement of collective property. Can you imagine that? The phrase, "the embezzlement of collective property." You mean private property? Are you stupid? Less than a month later, the Law of Five Years of Grain was established. And this law made it so all food and water on cargo trains, collective farms, including inside the barns and out in the fields and storage warehouses, were equivalent to state property. And anyone found taking anything from these locations was to face maximum punishment. This punishment included execution by shooting, confiscation of property, and 10 years in jail. And we all know what Russian jail was like in the '30s. Throwing a grenade. God damn it. Maybe we don't, but it was terrible. All right, it was like as common, I mean, genuinely, but way worse.
The new law also raised the grain quota to unattainable levels, adding more pressure on farmers to work harder. And the only free food available was the stuff that could be grown in their small gardens, but even that was confiscated and looted by the state. State-supplied rations were the main source of food since Stalin also raised the prices and taxes on food found in stores. He's like, "You know, let's control the supply as much as we possibly can so we can control who's using the supply and consuming the supply." And that's just the people. That's just the people of the country that he's, uh, or the organization, the Brotherhood, whatever that he's, uh, has ultimate control over or wants ultimate control over.
Testimony from Sviatoslav Ani describes how government rations were designed to starve the people of Ukraine. And this is a quote: "For comparison, let's consider the daily ration of the Soviet soldier. The soldiers of the Red Army received at that time 1 kg or 36 ounces of bread per day. The entire city of Odessa lived on rations which were insufficient for healthy people, but which kept it from starving. The rural population was not subject to rationing and it perished. People in the villages could not receive any help from their relatives in towns because the city population was hungry too."
So, with that, it's a genocide. Obviously. It's very clearly. I mean, you would have to be so incredibly incompetent to not see this as something that's going to be putting pressure on people and starving people and killing people en masse. The state-run rationing system combined with the new Stalinist laws led to a massive famine and left millions of people starving. And if you look at testimony from the time, you can really get a glimpse at how bad conditions were.
A survivor named Tatiana Pokrovskaya was 10 years old in 1932, right when the law went into effect. And their testimony goes as follows: "In 1932, I was 10 years old, and I remember well what happened in my native village in the Kiev region. The Communists had taken all the grain, and although they saw that we were weak and hungry, they came and searched for more grain. My mother had stashed away some corn that had already sprouted, but they found that too and took it. What we did manage to sow, the starving people pulled up out of the ground and ate. That summer, the vegetables couldn't even ripen as people pulled them out of the ground still green and consumed them. People ate leaves, nettles, milkweed, seeds. And autumn, no one had any chickens or cattle here. And someone had a few potatoes or beets, but people coming in from other villages told the very same story. They would travel all over trying to get food, and they would fall by the roadside, and none of us could do anything to help. When the ground froze, they were just left lying there dead in the snow. Or if they died in their house, they were dragged out into the cattle shed, and there they would lie frozen until spring. There was no one to dig graves. All of the train stations were overflowing with starving and dying people. Everyone wanted to go to Russia, but because it was said that there was no famine there, very few of those who actually left returned, and most perished along the way. They weren't allowed into Russia and were turned back at the border. And those who somehow managed to get into Russia could save themselves."
There are truly disturbing and haunting images of this, by the way. The Holodomor. If you guys don't know, also, I apologize. There's a lot of scholars who their entire focus is in Russian-Ukrainian relations for like the last thousand years or some crazy like that. So, this is not for the academic audience. Generally speaking, this is for people like me who don't really know. You know, I'm not smart. I didn't go to school. I didn't go to school. But yeah, I just like read books and and read. I want to learn more about it. I read something interesting and I want to just learn more about it. And, you know, if you want to really get into the nitty-gritty, leave some comments on the best sort of maybe academic books really breaking down certain elements of this. This is just what we could find best on the internet combined with the, you know, general information from Red Famine, which is an excellent book, by the way. Horrifying book. Once again, the images are haunting and horrible, and there are lots of them. There's lots of proof of this.
And this whole thing, by the way, was swept under the rug by the USSR. And it came out in the 1980s when the gulags came out. The idea that they were using internment camps and all this stuff. Like, the USSR was terrible. Things got so bad that cannibalism of children even became commonplace. They were eating their family members, their pets. People were so desperate for nourishment. And unfortunately, um, you know, that's just, that's what happens, I guess. There's even a diary entry from a woman named Oksana at the time who wrote about cannibalizing her daughter-in-law, Alexandra. And it's horrible, as you can probably imagine. But it's, that's a legitimate human thing that happened to a human being that wrote in their diary.
As a result of, I mean, this is like crazy. This all occurred in the first year, and things would only continue to get worse. As guards had to be set outside of barns to ensure that people didn't sneak in to steal food. Remember, it's property of the state, people. You can't steal property of the state, or you'll get, you'll get internment camped or go to a gulag or forced labor camp. I really don't know the difference between an internment camp and a forced labor camp. I assume an internment, yeah, internment is just like reasonless gathering of people. I think. Yeah, pretty sure. So, yeah, if you stole food, if you tried to eat, if you didn't want to starve, then you'd just go to a camp or be killed, I assume. And if you didn't steal food to eat, you'd just die anyway.
In 1933, it was estimated that around 54,600 people were arrested for stealing from state property. And of those arrested, 2,000 people were executed. And that stealing of state property is just getting food. People eventually started to become aware of what was going on. And in desperate attempts to survive, they took what they could and fled from their homeland. Some succeeded in doing so. However, it didn't take long for Stalin to catch on to what was going on there. So, he implemented new measures to ensure that nobody left. Their hells. Blockades of armed troops were set up around every single village, city, and farm, making sure nobody left. Next, they issued internal passports to every resident, making it so that even if you did get past the blockade, you had to have your passport approved to get a train ticket to be able to travel and leave.
The blockades also prevented families from visiting or sending supplies to other family members who were struggling because, you know, their cousins, Russia and Ukraine are cousins, and there's areas that aren't being genocided, I guess. And they made it impossible. It was a horrible isolation tactic centered on making sure that you worked from sunup to sundown without any food and eventually die. You worked for the state, and you loved it. And if you resisted, you died. And also, you probably just died anyway, just in general, even if you didn't love it and you still worked.
Now, there was one way out of Ukraine, but it wasn't what Ukrainians were looking for. That was deportation against their will. And once again, that is a theme in this video. Stalin wasn't satisfied with the systemic starvation of Ukraine, and he had continued and started to deport Ukrainians in order to not only make the population easier to control, but also to instill another level of fear amongst the peasants. It is reported that some 300,000 Ukrainians were deported out of the North Caucasus and across the USSR. Stalin was quick to move more people from other parts of the USSR to that area where he removed the Ukrainians so they could inhabit the 14,000,000 empty homes and continue to work without the idea of private property or nationalism or anything else that's not, you know, effective as determined by Joseph Stalin. It was also at this time they took a bunch of Ukrainian children and threw them into Russian orphanages to assimilate them into Russian culture.
In the end, the Holodomor resulted in roughly 4 million Ukrainian deaths alone, averaging about 28,000 people dying per day. And Soviet records state that in 1932, 4.27 million tons of grain were harvested, which equated to enough grain to feed 12 million people. Meaning there would have absolutely been enough food to spare for the people of Ukraine. Stalin had to ensure that Ukrainians complied with his rules, or else they would suffer. And suffer they absolutely did. Between systematic starvation and deportation, Ukrainians suffered for two years as they watched their families and the world collapse around them.
Moving on to the time of World War II. This would give Ukrainians some reprieve, but it would also give them time to prepare a counterattack against Stalin and his regime. So, time went on, and World War II would approach quickly around the corner. We all know the USSR's involvement in World War II, don't we all? Right, they loved sending their most valuable assets to the front lines to fight in glory and honor. We all know that's true. I'm being sarcastic.
With the approach of World War II, Stalin's sights focused on, well, Finland first, and then the Nazis. And all these events would give the Ukrainians a certain level of reprieve and also allow them to prepare a counterattack against Stalin and his regime. In 1942, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was formed and aimed to use guerrilla warfare against Nazis, Soviets, and any Soviet sympathizers that resided in Ukraine. They were killing everybody. I mean, that's, that's hardcore, dude. The army would go around terrorizing state property and fighting against troops stationed within Ukraine.
In 1944, just before the war ended, Stalin started to redirect his efforts to deal with the insurgents in Ukraine. And if you could believe it, one of his main methods was just getting them out of there. Deportation. In the spring of 1944, the Red Army had been constantly battling the UPA. And if you look at the articles talking about the Insurgent Army, they often refer to themselves as the UPA because the word for insurgent in Ukrainian is "povstanska," so they're the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Stalin's men suffered casualties, and this resulted in Stalin getting more and more fed up with Ukrainians, if that was even possible. It was becoming clear that something needed to be done for Stalin, especially after famous Soviet military commander Nikolai Vatutin was killed in an ambush by UPA members. Hey, man, insurgents don't mess with them. All right? Don't mess with them. Or I can't, I don't know if I can say "insurgent." That's a very broad term.
So, Stalin began to mass deport the families of insurgents and anyone who was suspected of working with the UPA. The Red Army arrested and deported around 360,000 Ukrainians over the course of seven years, from 1944 to 1951. And almost all of these people were taken deep into Siberia and the Western USSR to be put where, where do you think? You think they were relocated? Taken to the Ritz? The Ritz-Carlton? Just north of the Mongolian Steppe? No, labor camps. Gulags. They were, they were forced to work, likely until they die. Each year, the amount of deported Ukrainians nearly doubled, with around 880,000 Ukrainians being deported in 1946 to 1947 alone. And Stalin didn't just stop there. The Red Army would kill around 153,000 insurgents, leaving 37,000 of the original army from 1944 either still alive or completely deported by 1948. The UPA was either no longer effective or decimated. But as the data shows, Stalin didn't care and wanted to ensure they never resurfaced again.
In April of 1951, because this guy was an, Stalin deported around 9,500 Jehovah's Witnesses from Ukraine because they defied the preachings of, uh, of communism. You know, you're not allowed to have. There's no freedom of really anything. Private property is like, kind of like the, the one that is, you know, that's like the most known one, but you can't do anything. You can't think. Can't do anything. It's literally 1984 in this. All right.
Russia, Ukraine, they really didn't get along that well in, uh, even the Soviet Union. And there's hundreds of years of history there that I would love to learn more about. And if you guys know any of any sources specifically, I would love to read them. I'm really interested in this type of stuff and I don't spend that much time on the internet anymore. I'm going to be honest with you. So, touch grass. Touch grass and hug your fellow man.
Little palate cleanser. Joseph Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union for nearly 30 years. And over the course of those 30 years, he constantly battled Ukraine and its people. And those who were big supporters of communism and Stalin were indoctrinated to believe that the Ukrainian people were disruptive and they were bandits who stole food and killed innocent soldiers. But we all know that that's not true. Look back. Well, now we do, I guess. Now y'all do. Now we do. We, we don't all know that. We don't all know that. We don't all know that. But it's, it seems like that's that is the case. I'd say it doesn't take a genius to see that Ukrainians were considered second-class, at least from the very beginning of the USSR.
There was a civil war during the Bolshevik Revolution, brutal Nazi occupation, the famine in the '30s, we talked about, deportation, insurgent war. Not to mention the Holocaust, the other Holocaust, uh, of the Nazis also affected Ukraine. Ukraine finally declared its independence from the totalitarian regime of the USSR in 1991. And many of the atrocities weren't even known about by the rest of the world until the '80s. With some information leaving there was the very famous, uh, what that book called, or series of books, Gulag Archipelago. We learned about gulags. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, wherever his name is. Crazy man. And then a little while later, we have another war going on in Ukraine as well. And this time, some of the exact same things and tactics that were used by Stalin are being used currently. It makes more sense now because they are in an open war, but it's still insane and abhorrent and evil and sounds like it's not real. And we'll get into it.
Looking at the modern-day situation in Ukraine and Russia, I'm not even going to pretend to understand the geopolitical aspects of it. We're going to be talking about very specific parts. So, you know, what? I'm not an expert. I'm not a genius. This is just crazy. And, you know, when I use that word, I mean it. Okay. With our lens of the modern day and the information we have access to, we can see that there's been a turbulent, sort of complicated time between Russia and Ukraine, or what we now know as Russia and Ukraine, for centuries now. 18th, 19th, 20th century Cossacks, pre-Russia uprisings, and then you go Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War. It would be an oversimplification to say that they've been at war for a very long time, but they've definitely had a complex relationship. And over the last 100 years, there's been a lot of, a lot of, uh, tension. And Ukraine specifically has been fighting off a direct Russian invasion for at least the last two years and had a kind of bizarre proxy war situation ongoing since 2014.
Vladimir Putin, the current President of Russia, believes that Ukraine is meant to be a part of Russia and that Russians and Ukrainians have a long history of cultural unity, which is definitely true. Once again, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but there have been in lots of times of open war and lots of times of cultural unity. So, that statement is definitely true in some sense. As Ukraine was literally part of Russia in the USSR until it dissolved in 1991 and became purely independent. And before that, there was just regions, like I said, Russia was only a thing. I think in the, became a thing in the 19th century or some like that. Is the Polish-Lithuanian, the Cossacks? I mean, I don't know, dude. I'm so stupid. Okay, the Russian Empire, 1721. Okay, that's what it is. That's what I was thinking of. All right. So, the 18th century. So, I wasn't terribly wrong. Seems like Putin has some relatively Stalinistic beliefs about Ukraine. He was born in 1952, and that is only one year before Stalin's death. So, you know, maybe he is a reincarnation, potentially. I'm sure that his parents were deeply entrenched in communist ideologies, and he was also a KGB agent for the USSR. So, it's like, okay, that's a red flag. He's definitely a propaganda expert and probably a pretty smart guy. And this might explain why he has remained president since the year 2000. You know, that's 24 years of being president, winning each election and subsequent election in landslides, making his tenure as Russia's leader longer than Stalin's even, which, oh, that's scary.
The Russian government said on Monday that President Vladimir Putin signed a law that could keep him in office until 2036, allowing him to run for two more six-year terms. The move follows changes to the Constitution last year that were backed in a public vote over the summer and could allow the 68-year-old to potentially remain in power until the age of 83.
Shortly after returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin decided it was time to begin reclaiming Ukraine in the name of Russia, starting with his annexation of Crimea and then a war in the Donbas from 2014 to 2015. In early 2014, there was a growing divide in Ukraine. In the East, there was a pro-Russian sentiment that was growing, and the desire to rejoin Russia was growing with it. More and more pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian supporters were rioting and fighting in the streets. And seeing this as an opportunity to begin the reclamation of Ukraine, or at least part of it, Putin moved his army into the Donbas, which is an area at the very eastern tip of Ukraine, right here on a map. Slowly but surely, over only a few months, Russian-backed separatists and the Russian army captured the Donbas and even Crimea to the south of Ukraine. Crimea is a very important location politically and geographically for war and logistics, I think. Seems like it would be. Obviously, Ukraine wasn't going to allow Russia to continue pushing into its own territory.
So, in April 2014, Ukraine began to fight back against pro-Russian separatists and the Russian army. However, Ukraine couldn't completely stop Russia's advances. And by August of 2014, the insurgents had almost reached the city of Donetsk, which is anywhere from 80 to 60 miles away from the Russian borders. They pushed a little way into the country of Ukraine in the March westward. They captured the coastal city of, I'm not even going to try to say it. Once there, the soldiers were met with resistance from locals. And in typical Russian fashion, they began deporting people from the city who didn't have registered addresses within the city. They love deporting people, relocating people, sending people off to camps, uh, to do labor. And also, what the, the specific number of deportees and where exactly they went or moved to is not mentioned or written. I cannot find it online.
Continuing in Stalin's footsteps, Putin continues to remove the Ukrainian people from their homeland and assimilate them into the Russian way of doing things. In 2015, a ceasefire agreement called the Minsk Agreements became official, and the war in Donbas would cease for the time being. And in the agreements, the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk would become people's republics under Russian control, and fighting in those regions specifically would stop, or ceasefire, technically. It took a couple of months for the fighting to actually stop, but by February 2015, a ceasefire had officially been declared, and troops on either side could rest.
Breaking news this morning from Europe, where Russian President Vladimir Putin announcing a ceasefire set to begin at midnight on Saturday in eastern Ukraine. This is huge news. And talks ran for more than 15 hours in Minsk with leaders of France and Germany taking part with Ukraine and Russia. In the years after the ceasefire, there were temporary conflicts and different events that would occur between Ukrainian and Russian forces, but generally, it didn't seem to sit right with many Ukrainians that Russia could just declare two major cities a part of their country. But they just didn't really have a choice, especially with the presence of Russian separatists, uh, in the area. It's very complicated.
And it wouldn't be until 2022 that Putin would declare an invasion of Ukraine and start an actual war. From March 2021 to February 2022, satellite images, random videos, and secret intelligence reports revealed that Russia was building up troops, tanks, and supplies along the Ukrainian border between Russia and Belarus. And Putin and his cabinet would deny that they were planning an invasion after being heavily questioned by the US and NATO. Which, you know, makes sense. "Hey, are you about to invade Ukraine? The buffer between the West and Russia and the East?" "No, no, we're not. No, we're not going to do that." Okay. We trust you.
In spite of all that, escalations between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian insurgents would occur in late February of 2022. And a few days later, Putin would acknowledge the insurgents' independence from Ukraine in Donetsk and Luhansk, stating, "In this regard, I consider it necessary to take a long overdue decision to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic." Using this reason as his casus belli, on February 21st, Putin would send troops into separatist-occupied areas and call them peacekeeping missions, ensuring the insurgents' safety. Three days later, Putin would announce a special military operation aimed at helping the people trapped in Ukraine and demilitarize and denazify the Kyiv regime. This resulted in missiles being launched across the border, tank battalions, and thousands of troops marching deep into Ukrainian territory. A counterattack would be launched, and to this day, these two nations have been battling it out.
After this started, once again, Russia began to deport citizens against their will in occupied cities. This wave of deportation sounds like it's, you know, not real. Sounds like this is maybe potentially a conspiracy, but it's, it's, it's written and documented, and it's ridiculous. There is a state-run plan to generations of Ukrainians and end the war in Ukraine and the rebellion, or whatever they call it, the special military defense operation, via child abduction. That is a state-run thing that Russia is currently doing.
As mentioned before, Russia has specifically deported children in the past, but this time it is way different and on a much larger scale. On October 27th, 2021, Putin appointed Senator Maria Lvova-Belova as the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights, a position that had only been around since 2009. And from there, the systemic removal of Ukrainian children to Russia has been a prominent state-run initiative. The first instance of these systematic deportations took place in 2014 during the Donbas war, when Russian celebrity Liza Glinka supposedly helped evacuate sick and injured children from Ukrainian separatist regions in eastern Ukraine to Moscow for treatment. But if you dig a little bit deeper, you'll find that special camps had been set up in Russia for the evacuation of children from Ukraine. And furthermore, there are three state-approved narratives used by the Russian government to justify taking kids from Ukraine and putting them inside these camp systems. Russia, not exactly known for their camp systems being child-friendly.
The first is the evacuation of orphanages and state wards from Ukrainian facilities. And the second is the direct transfer of children to the camps with the direct consent of the parents. And lastly, the movement of injured children to Russia for treatment. The first mention of these camps was in 2014, at the same time that Liza Glinka was reported saving injured children. And just reading these narratives, it's sickening to see how manipulative each one of these is. And knowing how state governments have the tendency to just lie about, especially in time of war, or, you know, it's a propaganda game. This is not what is the narrative is not true. Ever. Literally, ever. It's just not. That's how it works.
So, these poor parents believe that this is the best chance that their children have in, you know, a horrible time of of conflict or whatever. But in reality, their children are being taken away and put into a system of camps aimed at re-educating and assimilating them into Russian culture so they don't resist the current invasion or any future invasions of Ukraine. Very similar to what China is doing to the Uyghurs. It's almost like these places suck. There's a phenomenon called the Returning Soldier Effect. That after wars, more men are born. Women tend to give birth to more males after time of war or intense conflict. And it seems like Russia knows that. And they're using the whole point of this is taking children from Ukraine to ensure that they lose generations of children who eventually would be able to become resistance and and prevent them from doing what they want. It's, it's very deep and, um, seems conspiratorial, but it's actually documented and real, and this is actually happening. And I can't imagine this. You know, I've seen nothing about this ever. Two people reached out to me about this. I got an email and a guy on Twitter. That's all I've ever seen about this.
You can understand why they would want to do that. To remove the children from the Ukrainian zeitgeist of culture and then just indoctrinate them into being Russian citizens. It makes sense from a strategic perspective. And there is further proof of this because many of these children are being adopted into Russian families after they have left the camps. And the camps, by the way, are stationed all across Russia, but mostly along the Ukrainian-Russian border, meaning that most of the camps were strategically placed along this border in prep for the upcoming invasion. So, premeditated. Premeditated deportation, kidnapping of children, re-education camps. Pretty great.
Russia is propagandizing and pushing this narrative and idea extremely hard with photos and videos of Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights, the beloved Maria Lvova-Belova, welcoming abducted children to Russia and even adopting multiple Ukrainian children herself. Wow, what a saint. Multiple reports from Russian officials indicate that between 200,000 and 330,000 Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia by the summer of 2022. And by the summer of 2023, an official report from Maria Lvova-Belova claimed that 700,000 children had been moved to Russia seeking asylum. So, who knows how many more children have been abducted and deported into Russia? What is known for sure is that we are witnessing probably one of the most malicious, evil programs in the modern era that is just like, you know, you put a couple different hats on it and look at it a different way, and it's like some we saw in the early 20th century. I mean, this is just what's happening at the camps. Are you sure we don't trust you? Why are you kidnapping hundreds of thousands of children?
With Lvova-Belova at the helm and Putin acting as the Stromboli puppet master, these two criminals are orchestrating a cultural genocide of the Ukrainian people by removing younger generations and re-educating them. But thankfully, the story isn't all bleak. As people are fighting back to bring the kidnapped children home. And the International Criminal Court put out an arrest warrant for both Vladimir Putin, obviously, and Maria Lvova-Belova on March 17th, 2023, adding incentive for national governments and bounty hunter vigilantes to hunt these two down and bring them to justice.
Next, multiple organizations such as the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children and Save Ukraine are working hard to bring back stolen children and return them to their families and save the children from the streets, preventing any further abductions. So far, each organization has saved less than 1,000 children, as both organizations have only started recently. However, that is 1,000 children saved from the re-education camps they would have been taken to in Russia. Now, I don't like, what is that? That can't, that's like so bad. That's so bad. Am I just crazy? That seems so bad. I've seen people defending this, and I just don't understand it. You're defending the destruction of a culture. Um, I don't care about the political nonsense, like nonsensical left-right political. I don't give a about that. Ukraine has been around a lot longer than wokeism and all the modern stuff, okay? They're just, they're ruining an ancient culture. They're ruining, I guess not ancient, but they're ruining a beautiful old culture by kidnapping children en masse and sending them to re-education camps. That's crazy that that's a thing that's currently happening right now. And I just don't see it on the news except for 60 Minutes.
These organizations have been working hard to spread the word about this atrocity that is going on in Ukraine. And they went on, uh, 60 Minutes and have written numerous articles about their work. And hopefully, as they continue their work, more and more children can be saved and see the war end in Ukraine as soon as possible. Putin seems fairly adamant about not stopping until all of Ukraine is under his control. But once again, I don't know anything about war. I'm not going to pretend to know anything about the geopolitical situation. All I know is the facts that I have been able to gather from the internet. And it's pretty crazy, though, to be honest, that all this stuff's happening.
So anyways, thank you all for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed. If you want to see this same video uncensored, go to Gump Club and, uh, you can watch it there. Go to Sour. Buy some candy. I really don't know. I really don't know. But yeah, that's history for you. And modern times, still ongoing. And under the guise of like, just, what? There's people defending it. It's crazy.