Mark Smallwood 🇬🇧🇺🇦

Founder | Strategic Advisor | Dual-Use Tech Investor Scaling Ukrainian innovation through UK-based ventures. Protecting origin, accelerating civilian impact, building global trust.

Cranfield University – Cranfield School of Management Senturion Capital

United Kingdom

Oct 27, 2025

Before you scroll past another post about Ukraine – stop – read this one – it matters.

What happens in Ukraine won’t stay in Ukraine.

As autumn settles in across Europe, we remember.

Because some things shouldn’t ever be allowed to fade with the seasons.

In 2007, a little girl called Madeleine McCann vanished.

One child. One story. One family.

And nearly two decades later, that single disappearance still echoes through our collective memory.

Rightly so.

Because the abduction of a child is a wound that never fully heals.

Now, shift that lens to Ukraine.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, more than 35,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted – forcibly taken from their homes, transported across borders, and placed deep inside Russia or Russian-occupied territory.

This isn’t chaos.

It isn’t a tragic by-product of war.

It is systematic. Documented. Organised.

These children have been moved through state-controlled pipelines: filtration camps, orphanages, re-education facilities.

Their Ukrainian names are erased.

Their identities changed.

They are reclassified, repatriated, and rewritten out of existence.

This isn’t hearsay. It’s evidence on the record – gathered by human rights monitors, Ukrainian authorities, and international investigators.

The International Criminal Court has already issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for these crimes.

Putin – the same man who has been feted on a red carpet in Alaska.

THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND CHILDREN.

If the disappearance of one child stopped a nation, how are we able to look away from this?

How do we explain our silence when it’s not one story, but tens of thousands?

This is not complicated.

It is not grey.

It is not distant.

State-sponsored child abduction is a war crime.

There is no moral ambiguity here.

There is no intellectual argument that holds water.

Russia is a terrorist state.

Stand with Ukraine. Stand against terror.

Ukraine #WhatHappensInUkraineWontStayInUkraine #RussiaIsATerroristState #PutinIsAWarCriminal #Geopolitics #HumanRights #WarCrimes #ChildrenOfWar #InternationalLaw #ChildAbduction #StandWithUkraine #Justice #Democracy #TruthMatters #NoToTerror

This post isn’t about partisan politics.
It’s about the systematic abduction of more than 35,000 Ukrainian children and the man already wanted by the ICC for that crime.
If you want to argue the facts, bring evidence.
If you want to deflect, don’t expect a reply.

Comment from Graeme Oliver :

This is without doubt a strong signal of the rise of Russian Nazism. Youth abductions in Ukraine has all of the similarities with the creation of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. Why do we continue to be so blind to the lessons in history? We allow people like Trump to act in denial of the truth. Perhaps it is because Trump has already embarked on his own MAGA national socialist campaign in the USA and is aligning himself with Tsar Putin.