Russia ramps up deportations of Ukrainian children with ‘summer camps’: researchers

Russia is ramping up its forcible deportations of Ukrainian children this summer with explicit aims to re-educate and militarize them for Moscow’s fighting forces, researchers and politicians say.

Authorities in Russia and occupied territories in Ukraine’s east are sending thousands of young people to so-called “summer camps” that promote Russian language, culture and propaganda, the researchers say. Under a program the Kremlin has dubbed “Useful Vacations,” children are also being sent to “visit” Russia for “patriotic” and “educational activities,” according to public Telegram posts by regional governments in the Russia-aligned Donbas.

In fact, researchers say, these are fronts for kidnapped children and orphans to be indoctrinated, with the ultimate goal of giving them Russian citizenship and erasing their Ukrainian identities.

“These children are becoming mobilization sources for Russian officials in the occupied territories,” said Vladyslav Havrylov, a research fellow at Georgetown University and a lead researcher of the Where Are Our People project uncovering the locations of forcibly deported Ukrainians.

“In some cases, they’re making children sign letters (forged by Russian and Russia-aligned officials) that say they don’t want to be Ukrainian citizens, they want to be Russian citizens. This is a criminal practice.”

The illegal deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children has become a top international concern as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds on after more than two years.

At last weekend’s Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland, where efforts to secure the return of those children were discussed at a meeting led by Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the deportations and erasure of Ukrainian identity “an element of genocide.”

“That’s pure colonialism,” he told reporters Sunday morning after the meeting. “These are things that Russia needs to be accountable for.”

Ukrainian officials and international partners say they have identified roughly 20,000 children who have been deported to Russia since early 2022. Of those, fewer than 400 have been successfully returned to their families in Ukraine.

But human rights organizations point out the practice dates back years — even before Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — and has only accelerated since the full-scale war began, amounting to hundreds of thousands of stolen and reprogrammed youth over the past two decades.

“It’s a continuous crime,” said Oleksandra Romantsova, executive director of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.

“They’re trying to indoctrinate this idea of a strong Putin, a strong (Russian) state, all of this, right from the beginning of childhood — as early as kindergarten.”

Mobilizing children

A series of laws signed by Putin in the lead-up to the war and the months that followed his invasion have made it easier for Russian authorities to grant citizenship to Ukrainian children, particularly orphans or those separated from their families.

Putin has also overseen an expansion of youth paramilitary organizations. He himself leads the state-backed Movement of the First, a youth movement created in 2022 that’s seen as the modern-day successor to the Soviet-era Young Pioneers. The organization educates — and in the case of Ukrainian children, re-educates — members in Russian patriotism and militarization, and against the idea of Ukraine as an independent state and culture.

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Although it’s not mandatory to join the Movement of the First, its board chairman has said the “ideal situation” is that all Russian children are members within five years.

Researchers and advocates say the movement is one of several organizations responsible for the programs being promoted as “summer camps.”

In late May, Leonid Pasechnik, the Moscow-appointed head of the occupied Luhansk People’s Republic, announced on Telegram that Russian “fraternal regions” will host 12,000 children from Luhansk for “summer recreation and health improvement” in the coming months.

He added that up to 40,000 children from occupied Ukrainian oblasts will also be sent on state-sponsored trips to Moscow, Rostov-on-don and other Russian cities and facilities for “educational” and “patriotic” courses, under the Russian government’s “Useful Vacations” program.

Pasechnik noted that number is “almost twice as many as last year.”

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, and researchers like Havrylov say these so-called “educational opportunities” are merely guises for re-education programs.

The ISW pointed to other officials from Russia-occupied territories touting hundreds of children being sent to camps and education facilities across Russia.

“Russian authorities will likely escalate deportation efforts throughout the summer under the guise of summer vacations, but these programs represent genocidal acts against the Ukrainian people despite Russian efforts to cloak them as temporary and positive educational opportunities,” the ISW said in its May 28 assessment of the war in Ukraine.

Moscow has also claimed it has only sought to protect vulnerable children from the war zone. The Russian government has not addressed specific allegations of forced deportations or re-education in recent weeks, and did not respond to requests for comment.

'Close to Japan'

Havrylov and his research team have been slowly tracking the locations of these camps and other temporary accommodations, and say they have found evidence of even more facilities this year, some of which are new and are spread across the vast Russian mainland.

“We’ve found more locations especially in the Far East, near Asian countries, close to Japan,” he said.

Havrylov said he wants Japan and other Indo-Pacific countries that have joined NATO allies in condemning Russia’s invasion to help secure the release of Ukrainian children taken to eastern Russia, and even host them temporarily until they can be reunited.

Romantsova noted that the area of Russia is eight time zones away from Ukraine — making it difficult to impossible to secure the return of children to their homes without help from nearby nations.

She said the Center for Civil Liberties has worked for years with Russian human rights campaigners and opposition politicians who are on the ground seeking to find Ukrainian children and organize their return. Those campaigners must work anonymously and covertly to avoid Moscow’s strict laws against anti-government protest or speech, and some have been forced into exile in nearby European countries, Romantsova said.

“It’s incredibly dangerous for them,” she said.

The White House said last week it is aware of the growing reports on the deportations, pointing to a “credible” Financial Times investigation that found evidence that abducted Ukrainian children have been put up for adoption in Russia.

“This is despicable and appalling,” Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor to U.S. President Joe Biden, said in a statement. “These Ukrainian children belong with their families inside Ukraine. Russia is waging a war not just against the Ukrainian military — but against the Ukrainian people.”

Last week, ahead of the G7 Summit and Ukraine peace summit, the U.S. announced sweeping new Russian sanctions that included individuals and entities accused of participating in the deportation of children. The list of targets included the Movement of the First and several officials in the Luhansk and Crimea regional governments.

Canada has been leading an international coalition to secure the return of Ukrainian children taken by Russia, and Trudeau announced on Sunday that it will contribute $15 million to support vulnerable children and the reintegration of youth who are returned to their families.

Trudeau said the international community must work to see Ukrainian children returned and ensure Putin and those involved are “held accountable for these crimes against humanity.”

Putin and his children’s rights commissioner Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova are facing warrants for their arrest from the International Criminal Court for war crimes due to the deportations of children. Russia denounced the warrants as “outrageous and unacceptable,” and Lvova-Belova rejected the accusations as false.