Russia indoctrinates children from occupied Ukraine at 210 sites, study says

KYIV – Russia’s secretive programme of re-education and military and police training for Ukrainian children from occupied territories is far larger than estimated earlier, war crime investigators at Yale University said in a study released on Sept 16.

Russian policies towards Ukrainian war orphans and children separated from their parents in areas controlled by the Russian army have outraged Ukrainians and prompted investigations of war crimes. One such case led the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and a top Russian aide on children’s issues.

Investigators have examined instances in which Ukrainian parents were killed by the Russian army in its invasion and their children were subsequently educated in Russian language and culture. In other cases, Ukrainian children were put up for adoption or placed in foster care with Russian families.

Children from Ukraine have been put in schools and cadet academies with military training oriented towards the fight against their own homeland, the Yale study found. Russian law enforcement agencies have also run programmes to care for Ukrainian children, it found.

The study, by the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, documented at least 210 sites in Russia and in occupied areas that hold Ukrainian children. Among them are military cadet schools; camps with a Russian nationalist orientation, such as a network called Warrior; and Russian Orthodox monasteries, schools, summer camps, orphanages and hospitals.

That was twice the number of sites that investigators expected to find, Mr Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said in an interview. He called the Russian programme the largest single kidnapping since World War II, when Nazi Germany moved children from occupied Poland to Germany for education in German.

The Russian authorities have said children were evacuated from the front line for their safety. The Geneva Conventions prohibit military recruitment in occupied territory, but Russia says the rule does not apply, given its claims to have annexed the land.

The Yale study documented the movement of children through the Russian system and the expansion of military training facilities.

“We see the pipeline from deportation to re-education to militarisation,” Mr Raymond said. “They take them, they make them Russians, and then they make them soldiers.”

The expanding Russian programme evokes early 20th-century Soviet policies of raising and training war orphans for service in the military or the secret police. It has security implications for Europe.

The programme re-educates and trains Ukrainians for service in the Russian army, though their country is an enemy of Russia on the battlefield now. Russia after 2014 raised and financed a large proxy force in eastern Ukraine that bolstered its army in the

2022 full-scale invasion.

As more of Ukraine is occupied, Russia has access to ever-larger pools of potential soldiers.

Russia now controls Ukrainian territory with an estimated four million to six million inhabitants, while Ukraine controls territory with about 30 million.

As its army and proxy groups overran territory in Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, Russia moved thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, scattering them in a constellation of sites from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Tracking all the children is virtually impossible, the study said, in part because the sites include cadet academies run by the military and the Investigative Committee, a domestic law enforcement agency.

The Ukrainian children who entered these camps and schools included orphans and children whose parents sent them to the sites to protect them from violence near the front, the study found.

It used geolocation techniques to link public information about Ukrainian children, such as social media posts, with sites in Russia and occupied territory. It then documented re-education or military training at the sites.

The study found evidence of re-education at 62 per cent of the sites and of military training at 19 per cent. It defined re-education as instruction in history and culture curricula approved by the Russian government. In military training, children took part in shooting and grenade-throwing competitions.

Official Russian records showed that various agencies in the Russian government managed about half the sites, including one called Young Patriot near Moscow. It is run by the same property management agency that maintains the Kremlin and presidential country homes.

At one youth camp, a satellite image taken in April showed rows of dark specks on an open field – people lined up in military formation. At the time, at least three Ukrainian children were at the site, the study said, but researchers had no way to ascertain whether they were among those standing in the formation.

The expanding network of camps, cadet schools, orphanages and other sites can potentially hold tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, the study said. That suggests “logistical and operational capacity committed to Russifying children taken from their home communities in Ukraine”, it said.

The Yale research group received US State Department funding to study and preserve open-source evidence of war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in Sudan. The Trump administration cancelled the programme, called Conflict Observatory. The researchers completed the study of Russian re-education sites after holding an online fund-raiser, Mr Raymond said. NYTIMES