By Galina Korol | 2025-08-04

They were supposed to be schoolchildren. Instead, thousands of Ukrainian boys and girls have been torn from their families, sent to camps across Russia and drilled to march, shoot and salute.

Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab has tracked dozens of these cases and says many more remain undocumented.

The indoctrination program is not sheltering children from war, as Moscow claims, but prepares them to fight in it, Humanitarian Research Lab director Nathaniel Raymond, said recently.

"It is likely to be the largest child abduction in war since World War Two," Raymond told The Times in July.

Researchers have identified 116 facilities across Russia where abducted Ukrainian children are being held, stretching from occupied Crimea to the Pacific coast. Many are first subjected to propaganda-laden "re-education," then transferred to cadet academies where they undertake weapon drills and march to the Russian anthem.

Ukrainian officials say they have collected conscription lists and even reports of minors killed in combat. Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's chief of staff, has called the practice one of the most harrowing crimes of the war, citing evidence that these children are being funneled directly into the Russian military pipeline.

Cynical replenishment of reserves

The forced removal and militarization of Ukrainian children are part of a deliberate Kremlin strategy, not isolated incidents, critics say. Russia seeks not only to deport children but to raise a generation loyal to Moscow and ready to fight for its interests, they add.

Russia expects thousands of abducted children to "replenish the Russian pool for mobilization -- cannon fodder," Kateryna Rashevska of Ukraine's Regional Center for Human Rights told Kontur.

The true number of kidnapped minors is unclear because of the war, but Ukrainian officials and international organizations estimate at least 19,546 have been deported. Russia disputes that figure, calling its actions an "evacuation."

Pavlo Lysianskyi, director of Ukraine's Institute for Strategic Studies and Security, called the mobilization of abducted children "one of the most terrible and cynical forms of Russian aggression."

The process strips minors of their identity, glorifies violence and obedience and folds them into Russia’s war machine, he told Kontur.

Training often begins with state-backed youth movements such as Youth Army and Warrior Center, said Rashevska.

She described how Russia shipped 25 children from occupied Zaporizhzhia province, Ukraine, to the Preobrazhensky Sports and Health Center in Moscow in July, where they endured "military discipline, drills, engineering training, tactical training and all types of weapons." Parents and children faced heavy pressure to comply, she said.

Militarization in Russia "starts from kindergarten," said Rashevska, citing one instance, where a fairy tale character, Petrushka, appeared with a machine gun at a party for five-year-olds, after which the children made tanks out of modeling clay.

Forced service

Researchers lack official data on how many deported Ukrainian boys are drafted into the Russian army once they turn 18. But it is clear Moscow does not plan to stop mobilizing abducted youth, said Rashevska. In fact, the practice will only expand, she said.

"Do we have any reasons to believe that this threat is real? Yes, we do," she said.

Adolescents whom she works with often describe how they strove to escape occupied territory before they turned 18, knowing that if they failed, they could be drafted and sent into combat.

Russian forces use coercion, bribes or even threats of hurting families to push young men into service, said Rashevska. She recalled one boy who went through Youth Army "re-education" in occupied territory. Russia sent him to the front immediately after he turned 18.

"He died there," she said.

Russia treats every adult in occupied territory as part of its "mobilization pool," Oleksandr Pavlichenko, director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, told Kontur.

He described a system of coercion that combines pressure and incentives to make avoiding conscription nearly impossible.

For example, he said authorities may withhold a graduate's diploma after university or technical school, shutting the door on his career unless he serves.

Forced mobilization has been a fixture in Crimea since 2014, with more than 10,000 residents drafted into the Russian armed forces, say watchers.

Ukrainian forces later killed or captured some of them.

'Under close scrutiny'

The mass removal of children from occupied Ukrainian territory and their funneling into Russia's military system violate international humanitarian law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, observers say.

Lysianskyi called the practice a "systemic policy that must be recognized as an international crime."

"It is not just deportation. It is preparation for war against the Motherland," he said.

The policy was one reason the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's commissioner for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. International justice considers these actions serious crimes committed at the highest levels of Moscow's leadership, the warrants signaled.

Lvova-Belova personally adopted Filipp Golovnya, a 17-year-old boy taken from Mariupol in 2022. Golovnya is unlikely to be drafted because "his fate is under close scrutiny," said Rashevska.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly stated that the return of abducted children is a top priority and a "red line" in any potential peace deal.

Ukrainian negotiators once handed Russia a list of 339 "extremely vulnerable" children: small children, orphans and others whose whereabouts were unknown, said Rashevska. Russia ultimately returned only six, according to Ukrainian officials.

Later, Russian officials claimed some of the children were no longer in their custody, had turned 18 or "expressed a desire not to return."

Rashevska called such excuses a "clumsy attempt" to cover up the situation, noting that officials can alter children's names and records after adoption.

Russia may try to obscure its actions but cannot erase the crime itself, say observers.

"Ukraine and the international community must fight for every child. Silence in this matter equals complicity," said Lysianskyi.