Inside 200 Russian camps for ‘brainwashing’ Ukrainian children

Russia is running a programme for “re-education” and militarisation of Ukrainian children, a report has found. According to the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), there are more than 200 different camps across Russia and the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine where these children have been taken.

These facilities include summer camps, schools, military bases, medical facilities, religious sites and universities. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, thousands Ukrainian children have been forcefully deported by Moscow troops.

Let’s take a closer look.

Re-education, military training & more

The study documented at least 210 sites in Russia and occupied areas that hold Ukrainian children.

The report titled Ukraine’s Stolen Children: Inside Russia’s Network of Re-Education and Militarization discovered that there are at least 130 camps in Russia involved in re-education, including efforts to indoctrinate Ukrainian children with pro-Russia narratives, according to The Guardian.

At these camps, children are being re-educated to instill in them Russian patriotism, including lectures on Russian history and singing the national anthem, it said.

The study found 39 of the facilities run militarisation programmes where children, particularly older ones and even as young as eight, are given weapons training, made to participate in grenade-throwing competitions and tactical medicine courses. These children were reportedly forced to participate in combat drills, given paratrooper training and taught how to assemble drones for the Russian armed forces.

Children have been held at these locations for different periods of time, with some having gone temporarily and returned home. Others have been there indefinitely.

The researchers said they cannot verify if any of these children who were given military training were ever conscripted into the Russian military or deployed in the war with Ukraine.

The latest findings reveal that Russia is “operating a potentially unprecedented system of large-scale reeducation, military training, and dormitory facilities capable of holding tens of thousands of children from Ukraine for long periods of time.”

How the research was carried out

Research used open-source intelligence, news reports and Russian government documents, as well as satellite imagery, to find Russia’s plans for Ukrainian children.

They corroborated the presence of children with at least five independent sources.

At least half of the locations found by the researchers were directly operated by the Russian government, said the report.

“We can see trench works, firing ranges, parade grounds. The only thing we don’t know is whether [Ukrainian children have] already been deployed in battle,” Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, was quoted as saying by The Guardian. 

The study was conducted at the request of Ukraine to “better understand the full size of the network of facilities where children are held, to help them eventually return to their homeland,” Raymond told NBC News in a telephone interview.

“It’s really important that all the people involved in different ways to bring the kids back have the most accurate geospatial information possible, and this is it,” he said.

How many Ukrainian children are in Russia?

Ukraine has identified that more than 19,500 children were unlawfully deported or taken forcefully by Russia since its full-scale invasion. However, the actual number is believed to be much higher.

According to Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the number of deported Ukrainian children is closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.

Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova claimed that Russia has “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023.

So far, Ukraine has been able to bring back 1,605 children, with the help of third-party mediators, such as Qatar, South Africa and the Vatican.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes and issued an arrest warrant against him and Lvova-Belova for their alleged actions and role in the unlawful deportation of children and their illegal transfer from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.

The Yale report found that Russia’s systematic deportation and militarisation of children violates the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“This report demands action. Children are always the most vulnerable victims of armed conflict," Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak said, as per Euronews. 

“Not only have these children undergone trauma and displacement, they have also suffered systemic deportation, illegal adoption, and forced assimilation,” he added.

The study also found that Russia is looking to expand several sites to accommodate more children, and at least two new camps are under construction.

“What we have here is an unprecedented network of facilities, expressly built and expanded since 2014, to turn Ukrainian children into Russians,” Raymond, director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, said to The Guardian. “It is a pipeline for Ukraine’s children to be re-educated – brainwashed – and turned into soldiers.”

With inputs from agencies