While bombing Zaporizhzhia, the invaders announce plans to take Ukrainian children to Russia for ‘rehabilitation’ The announcement by Russian-installed collaborators that children and the elderly would be taken from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts to southern Russia or occupied Crimea was doubtless aimed at demonstrating Russian ‘concern’ for the most vulnerable at a time of war.It came just days after Russian missiles targeted a humanitarian convoy leaving Zaporizhzhia, killing 30 civilians, and amid nightly bombing of residential blocks in that city which Russia has been unable to occupy.This alone would justify scepticism about Russian motives for taking children away, but there are other grounds for fearing that the children would not be returned to Ukraine.On 8 October, Volodymyr Saldo, whom Russia is calling the acting ‘governor of the Kherson oblast’, announced that invitations had come from the Stavropol, Krasnodar and Rostov oblasts, and that children from both Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts would be able “to rest and to get to know new peers”.Russia needs men whom it can mobilize, he explained, as well as a picture for propaganda purposes, and does not want everybody fleeing the Ukrainian territory it is occupying."