From re-education to the trenches: what the Russian Federation is doing with kidnapped Ukrainian children

Russia has begun using children abducted from the occupied territories of Ukraine in hostilities against Ukraine itself. Some of them are mobilized into the army after reaching adulthood.

The Times writes about this, citing Ukrainian officials and international researchers.

Since 2014, the Russian Federation has forcibly deported over 35,000 Ukrainian children. Some of them went through “re-education camps” and later through cadet corps, where they are trained for military service.

“Putin’s goal is to destroy Ukraine as a nation, starting with its future generation,” said Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, on the podcast The General and The Journalist.

According to him, Ukraine has documentary evidence of mobilization — including draft lists and data on deceased minors.

“Russia wants to create new soldiers from kidnapped Ukrainian children – this is barbarity and a form of psychological warfare,” Yermak added.

The campaign is also evidenced by data from Yale University’s Humanities Research Laboratory. Its representative, Nathaniel Raymond, told The Times that researchers are looking into dozens of cases of former abducted children being recruited into war.

“These are not isolated cases. We are dealing with the largest abduction of children since World War II,” he stressed. “This is not re-education. This is mobilization.”

To date, at least 116 institutions have been identified in the Russian Federation, from Crimea to the Far East, where Ukrainian children were held. After “re-education,” the teenagers were sent to cadet schools, where they received weapons training.

One of these boys, 19-year-old Vlad Rudenko from Kherson, told reporters how in 2022 he was taken from his home at gunpoint and sent to a camp in Crimea for a year and a half.

“We were forced to sing the Russian national anthem, we were trained physically, we were taught to shoot,” he says. “I was lucky that my mother pulled me out of there. But there are those who were forced to fight.”

The mass abduction of children was one of the reasons for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, who personally adopted a Ukrainian boy named Philip.

Ukraine categorically rejected the idea of exchanging kidnapped children for Russian prisoners of war during talks in Istanbul. Kyiv said it was an attempt to use children as “trading currency.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky has launched an international campaign to make the return of Ukrainian children a red line in any future peace talks. According to sociologists, this topic has one of the strongest emotional responses in the US and Europe — on par with the persecution of religious minorities.

“This is not just a humanitarian catastrophe — it is proof that the regime in Moscow is acting as a terrorist state,” Yermak concluded.

As a reminder, the Russian occupiers took 50 children from the Antratsytivskyi district , which is located in the occupied part of the Luhansk region, to Kalmykia in the Russian Federation under the pretext of “rehabilitation.”

As reported, Russia signed an official agreement on cooperation with the “Young Army” in the temporarily occupied territory of the Donetsk region.

In addition, the Center for National Resistance stated that Russia is again resorting to the removal of Ukrainian children from temporarily occupied territories, this time from the Zaporizhia region.

Also follow “Pryamim” on Facebook , Twitter , Telegram , and Instagram.