By Olha Chepil | 2024-12-11

KYIV -- The United Kingdom's new sanctions package is aimed at parties that support Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to steal Ukrainian children and to erase their cultural and national identity.

In particular, the package of restrictions announced November 19 targets a Russian youth organization known as the Young Army movement and Avangard, a training center for youth.

"These organizations operate with the support of the Russian Defense Ministry and Vladimir Putin personally," Kateryna Rashevska, an analyst at Ukraine's Regional Center for Human Rights, told Kontur.

"They spread propaganda about serving in Russia's military and force children, particularly from [Russian]-occupied Ukrainian territory, to attest to their loyalty to Russia, which violates international humanitarian law."

'Brainwashing children'

These organizations teach an alternative Russian version of history and incite hatred towards Ukraine and other Western countries, said Rashevska.

"They're engaging in militarization and indoctrination -- in other words, they're brainwashing children," she said.

"In February 2024, the [United Nations] Committee on the Rights of the Child denounced Russia, and Russia was urged to put an end to the politicization of education, which doesn't align at all with those rights," Rashevska said. "But the Kremlin is continuing to ignore these recommendations."

Rights activists are growing increasingly worried about Ukrainian children being turned into Russian soldiers.

Russia has forcibly removed more than 20,000 children from Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office, told journalists on October 14.

"But no one knows exactly how many children are actually there," Myroslava Kharchenko, the chief legal officer of the foundation Save Ukraine, told Kontur. "Even from the liberated territories, mothers are scared to come forward and say that their children are somewhere [in Russia]."

"And then, quite a lot of our territory is still occupied, and we don't know anything about what's happening there. There are no reports," she said.

Ukrainian children are kidnapped from occupied territory and placed with Russian foster families or in adoption programs, say rights activists. These deportations aim to integrate children into Russian society, and they destroy the children's Ukrainian identity.

"It's like what Nazi Germany once tried to do -- the procedure is very similar," Kharchenko said.

"They teach [children] to love everything Russian, they instill in them that everything is bad in Ukraine and that there are Nazis there," she said. "Three or four months pass, and of course the child believes that everything will be fine for him [or her] in Russia."

Blacklisted

The United Kingdom is not the first to place restrictions on Russia's Young Army movement.

The movement has been blacklisted in the European Union since 2022, in Canada and the United States since 2023, and in Australia and New Zealand since earlier this year.

Such sanctions help restrict the operations of these organizations around the world, say analysts.

"In practice, the sanctions amount to a curtailment of payments and other financial transactions, and a ban on holding and participating in events in these states," Rashevska told Kontur.

London also sanctioned 10 individuals and legal entities involved in the forced removal of Ukrainian children.

Among them are Tetiana Zavalska, whom the Kremlin appointed to run the Kherson orphanage and who forcibly transferred 46 children to Russia to be adopted.

There is also Vitaliy Suk, director of the Oleshki boarding school for children with disabilities in Kherson, who used his position to illegally transfer Ukrainian children with disabilities from Kherson.

Pawns in war

"No child should ever be used as a pawn in war, yet President Putin's targeting of Ukrainian children shows the depths he will go to in his mission to erase Ukraine and its people from the map," UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in a statement November 19, the 1,000th day of Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine.

"The new British government is starting to give the impression that it wants to go above and beyond the previous level of support for Ukraine," said Svitlana Chernetska, a staff correspondent in the United Kingdom for the Ukrainian television channel Inter.

"It's continuing to review opportunities for new sanctions in order to influence the Russian dictator's inner circle."

Chernetska said that several weeks ago she was invited to the Foreign Office to meet with deportation victims who had been rescued.

She was intrigued to find that members of both houses of Parliament and a number of foreign ambassadors had received invitations to listen to the stories of Ukrainian civilians who had been illegally taken to Russia and of Ukrainians who are waiting for their relatives to return.

"Ukrainian victims were brought in specifically at the request of the British Foreign Office, and this wasn't the first time this happened," Chernetska told Kontur.

"The ministry works closely with Ukrainian organizations that are investigating the deportation schemes and identifying Russians who are involved in crimes," she said. "It's heartening to see that the results of this cooperation are concrete, in the form of new sanctions."

Blow to Russia's 'shadow fleet'

The United Kingdom last month also introduced sanctions on 30 vessels in Russia's so-called shadow fleet of illicit oil tankers.

Among the ships on the list are the Belgorod, Krasnoyarsk, Antarktika and other oil tankers. The sanctions additionally target Russian insurance companies that enable the fleet.

"This is the biggest package of British sanctions against Russia's shadow fleet," said Chernetska.

The move "brings the total number of oil tankers sanctioned by the UK to 73, more than any other nation," the Foreign Office said in its announcement.

"This means that London is sanctioning ships that are skirting other sanctions," Chernetska, who has investigated this topic, told Kontur.

Before the full-scale invasion, Russian oil was exported primarily by Western tankers, she said.

But when the governments of the G7 countries prohibited their companies from doing business with Russia, Russian companies responded by buying up old tankers, which sail without insurance or with unreliable Russian insurance.

"So now this isn't just about illegal enrichment, sanctions evasion and financing of the war, but also about environmental safety," Chernetska said. "This is because the older the ship, the greater the chances of catastrophic oil spills."

"This has already happened more than once," she added. "This is the argument that needs to be used to influence countries that are supporting Russia's shadow fleet -- in particular, China, India and Türkiye, because the majority of the crude oil goes to them."