By Galina Korol | 2025-12-26

Russia is using Ukrainian children from occupied territories as instruments of international messaging, sending them as far as North Korea, one of the world's most isolated regimes. The practice was detailed December 3 during testimony to the US Senate.

Kateryna Rashevska, an expert in international justice and legal analysis at the Regional Center for Human Rights, described cases in which Ukrainian children were sent to what Russia calls "cultural exchange" camps in North Korea. She presented photographs confirming the trips.

Rashevska cited a 12-year-old boy from occupied Donetsk Region and a 16-year-old girl from Simferopol, Crimea. According to her testimony, the children were taken to the Songdowon camp, about 9,000 kilometers (about 5,590 miles) from their homes.

"Children there were taught to 'destroy Japanese militarists' and met Korean veterans who, in 1968, attacked the US Navy ship Pueblo, killing and wounding nine American soldiers," Rashevska told the Senate.

Children's 'diplomacy'

Russian authorities have openly promoted the trips. Official statements describe a "visit to North Korea by a children's delegation from the Movement of the First" as an important step in cultivating "people's diplomacy."

Rashevska said the language of cultural exchange conceals a different objective.

"Even though these visits are presented as 'cultural exchanges,' they actually amount to 'children's diplomacy,' which essentially legitimizes the totalitarian regime in North Korea," Rashevska told Kontur.

She said it is particularly revealing that one of the co-organizers of a contest linked to the trip was the Artek camp in occupied Crimea. For Ukrainian children, participation draws them into cooperation with a state openly backing Russia's war against Ukraine.

"All these children have already been subject to ideological influence and militarization. In this way they become a convenient instrument of Russian propaganda," Rashevska said.

From dozens to thousands

Rights advocates say the North Korea trips are part of a broader system. By sending children from occupied territories on international "exchanges," Russia seeks to demonstrate that they are already integrated into Russia's political and cultural space and are carriers of "Russian identity."

In 2024, the Regional Center for Human Rights documented similar trips involving Ukrainian children to India and China. Patterns observed in Belarus point to the scale of the policy.

"In 2016 there were just eight Ukrainian children from the occupied Donetsk Region who were deported to Belarus. In 2024 we were able to establish that there were 2,219 Ukrainian children there," Rashevska said.

To date, rights activists have identified 165 reeducation camps where Ukrainian children are subjected to militarization and Russification. These camps operate in occupied Ukrainian territories, in Russia and Belarus, and now also in North Korea.

Rashevska said participation is not voluntary.

"We're observing coercion to attend occupation schools. It's impossible to avoid militarization and indoctrination there," she said.

Training without consent

Another layer of abuse involves military and paramilitary camps that nearly every child from occupied territories passes through.

"The military camps serve two goals: the militarization and indoctrination of children," Myroslava Kharchenko, chief legal officer of the Save Ukraine foundation, told Kontur.

Children are isolated from familiar environments and forced to live under military discipline.

"The children are told that they're now in the army. They're forced to feel and behave like soldiers," Kharchenko added.

She said rigid hierarchies form quickly and break children psychologically.

"The kids understand that if they don't submit to the system, the system will discard them. They'll be punished, and no one will need them," she said.

Kharchenko described the case of a 17-year-old orphan who returned from Kherson Region after three weeks in the Avangard camp in Russia's Volgograd Region. The girl believed she was going to the seaside but was taken to the steppe.

"She was pulled out of her [adoptive] family under false pretenses," Kharchenko said.

The girl was issued a military uniform, housed in barracks and subjected to nighttime punishments.

"An instructor might come in during the night, wake up the kids and force them to do 150 squats, repeat slogans and sing the [Russian] national anthem," Kharchenko said.

Children were trained to shoot and handle weapons. Kharchenko warned that instructors who are veterans of Russia's war pose particular danger.

"I look at this child and grasp that they're completely trained for combat," she added.

Rashevska said public efforts to justify the seizure and reeducation of Ukrainian children are part of a broader policy.

"Along with the policy of Russifying Ukrainian children, these are blatant manifestations of genocidal intent -- appropriating a portion of the younger generation of the Ukrainian nation and turning these children into Ukraine's enemies," she said.

'For the money'

Behind the statistics are real families. One is Anna Zamyshlyaeva, whose son Anton has a severe disability.

Anton was born at 34 weeks after a traumatic delivery marked by hemorrhaging and severe inflammation. Doctors performed seven brain surgeries in his first months of life and later implanted two shunts to regulate pressure. Years of hospitalizations and constant monitoring followed.

His condition stabilized enough for him to attend school, but by age 12 the disease progressed. Because of brittle bones, he broke his legs twice under minimal strain.

Unable to care for him at home, Zamyshlyaeva placed Anton in the Oleshky boarding school near Kherson, one of Ukraine's leading facilities for children with developmental disabilities.

She last saw her son in late 2021, shortly before Russia's full-scale invasion. After the occupation began, she initially stayed in contact with the school by phone.

"They sent me photos showing everything was fine -- there was food, it was warm, and there were medicines," she told New Lines Magazine last October.

Communication eventually stopped. Zamyshlyaeva then learned that occupation authorities had begun removing children from the facility. Those who could walk were taken first, followed by children with more severe conditions.

The children were then separated by age. Those under 18 were left in Skadovsk. Those older than 18, including Anton, were sent without consent to psychoneurological boarding schools and nursing homes deep in occupied territory and in Russia.

Anton is now 23. There is no official information about his whereabouts.

"I don't know what is happening to him: to what extent his brain is functioning, how they are compensating for his needs, because his blood pressure was rising even before the full-scale war," Zamyshlyaeva told reporters.

Asked why Russia would take a severely ill child, Zamyshlyaeva offered a blunt answer: money. She said significant funds had accumulated in accounts linked to children with disabilities, and access to that money likely shifted to occupation-appointed "guardians."

"I haven't seen my son for almost four years. I don't know if he is alive," she told RFI in November. "But I search for him every day, because no mother should ever be forced to give up hope."