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The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) has concluded that children from Ukraine have been taken to at least 210 facilities inside russia and temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the russian Federation in 2022.
Children at these facilities routinely undergo “reeducation” and, in many cases, are placed in programs of forced militarization that include, though are not limited to, combat and paratrooper training. Children at some facilities have been engaged in the production of military equipment for russia’s armed forces, including drones.Re-education activities involving children from Ukraine have occurred in at least 130 sites (61.9%) identified in
this study. The activities constituting re-education include cultural, patriotic, or military programming that aligns with pro-russia narratives. At least 88 of these facilities are newly identified by HRL in this study.
Children from Ukraine underwent military training in at least 39 locations (18.6%) identified by HRL. At least 34 of
these facilities are newly identified. HRL identified activities that constitute militarization programs, including combat training, ceremonial parades and drills, assembly of drones and other materiel, and education in military history.
For at least a decade, putin has ordered the expansion of patriotic education and militarization of russia’s
youth.13 He signed one of his most recent orders on 20 September 2022, demanding that russia’s federal government develop a system of military sports training and patriotic education for youth.14 These orders resulted in the expansion of militarization programs targeting not just russia’s children, but Ukraine’s children as well. Following putin’s orders, camps and other programs exposing children to military training were developed in both russia and temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine
According to publicly available russian incorporation data, at least 106 of the 210 locations identified are managed by russian federal or local government bodies. russia’s government manages 55% of the locations where re-education activities occurred and 58% of locations where militarization of children from Ukraine occurred.
HRL observed that one in five locations have expanded or have new buildings within approximately the past decade. The geospatial distribution of these locations, a network of facilities which reaches from the Black Sea across Siberia to the eastern coast of the Pacific Ocean, stretches across more than 3,500 miles and 59 regions of temporarily occupied Ukraine and the russian Federation.russia has been engaged in the deportation, reeducation, militarization, and coerced fostering and adoption of children from Ukraine since at least 2014 in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by russia in February 2022, these efforts significantly expanded in scale and scope. Cohorts of children were rapidly included in the russian Federation’s pre-existing program of Russification from newly occupied regions such as Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol.
HRL can conclude that russia is operating a potentially unprecedented system of large-scale re-education, military training, and dormitory facilities capable of holding tens of thousands of children from Ukraine for long periods of time.
