Executive Summary:
- On March 12, the UN Human Rights Council concluded that Russia’s forcible transfer and deportation of children is a crime against humanity. Russia has been targeting children in the Ukrainian territories under its occupation in myriad ways.
- Culture and education are key spheres of influence, and Russia has deliberately forced a pro-Russia and pro-military environment and culture upon those living in the occupied territories, punitively punishing people—including children—who deem themselves Ukrainian.
- In taking over every aspect of a child’s existence, Russia can erase the idea of Ukrainianness from within, diminishing a sense of community, culture, and even loyalty to their own family, displacing these with the culture of the aggressor.
Four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the situation on the front lines remains stagnant. Russia is far from winning. In this war on the Ukrainian nation, culture, and identity, the military aspect is not the only theatre of conflict. Russia has been pouring its efforts into colonizing Ukrainian children’s hearts and minds, and indoctrinating and subjugating the local civilian populations in areas where it does have a foothold, attempting to erase any sense of Ukrainianness from those who comprise the country. This includes the abduction of Ukrainian children (see EDM, April 19, 2023, March 7, 2024, September 3, 29, 2025). On March 12, the UN Human Rights Council concluded that Russia’s deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children is a crime against humanity (United Nations, March 12).
While Russia has been forcibly transferring children from Ukrainian to Russian families, the war on children is multi-pronged. They are being targeted culturally through their schools, families, and official documentation and physically with drones and missiles (see EDM, April 14, September 9, 24, 29, 2025, March 3). This is a means of changing the country’s social fabric on a long-term basis.
In this author’s work with The Reckoning Project (TRP), the organization has documented a staggering number of cases of indoctrination (The Reckoning Project, accessed March 25). There are instances of teachers being intimidated and coerced—sometimes violently—into indoctrinating Ukrainian children with Russian political ideas and enforcing the usage of the Russian language instead of Ukrainian. They also oversee the increasing militarization of children through youth groups, members of which are given favorable treatment by pro-Russia teachers. The teachers who do not wish to be complicit in Russia’s system of re-education often have to leave their homes for their own safety. Children are subjected to intensive military training to prepare them to serve the same armed forces invading their own country (The Kyiv Independent, October 23, 2025).
Meanwhile, families are penalized for children’s pro-Ukrainian views, impacting domestic culture and home life. Parents and children face the threat of children’s removal if family members fail to comply with the demands of Russian occupiers—for example, Russia’s insistence of the acquisition of Russian passports (see EDM, January 22). A recent study from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights about the most serious violations of international humanitarian law from July 2024 to December 2025 noted that the forced adoption of Russian citizenship contravenes the 4th Geneva Convention, which specifically prohibits compelling individuals to swear allegiance to the hostile power (Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, February 2026). If children repeat views of pro-Ukraine parents in school, or even use the Ukrainian language, they can face hostility from teachers. Some have reported having their grades punitively lowered despite giving the same answers as their classmates (New Eastern Europe, December 2, 2025).
Amid these more direct forms of erasing children’s nationality and culture, Russia is also taking over the physical space which children inhabit on a daily basis. Russia is politicizing sites of play and remembrance, through the creation of parks, such as the “Russia – My History” multimedia parks in Luhansk and Melitopol. Meanwhile, scholars Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk highlight the erection of new Vladimir Lenin statues, as well as others honoring Russian figures, and the restoration of Soviet-era monuments (Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, February 9).
Russia’s deeper efforts in this space garnered recent international media attention when British popstar Charli XCX partied in Berlin with the daughter of Zhanna Shevtsova, from Russia’s Traditsiya Foundation—despite repeated cautions from Ukrainian journalists. The Traditsiya Foundation is one of many organizations responsible for work “aimed at integrating Donbas and liberated territories into a single cultural, educational, enlightenment, and civilizational space.” These efforts are part of the indoctrination of Ukrainian territories and their inhabitants into alignment with Russia, and deliberately and explicitly target children in the process (United24 Media, February 16).
Children have also been deliberately and physically targeted. In March 2022, Russians bombed the Mariupol theater despite the word “children” being clearly written outside in large letters (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 25, 2025). Moscow has forcibly transferred tens of thousands of children to Russia, even creating a “catalogue” of stolen children for adoption (Euronews, August 8, 2025). The International Criminal Court in 2023 issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their role in forced deportations (International Criminal Court, March 17, 2023; see EDM April 19, 2023).
This is a continuation of policies that have been implemented in the occupied territories since 2014. Russia first started its guerilla invasion in the east of Ukraine, taking over political, media, and cultural institutions. In the east of the country, a cultural hub, the Izolyatsia Foundation, was seized in 2014 and turned into a secret prison and torture camp (DW, October 15, 2014; Radio Svoboda, January 27, 2021; OPORA, February 21, 2024). In 2019, thousands of children in Russia-occupied Donbas and Crimea were being subjected to military training or other military-related activities, with the ministries of education in these areas following the Russian state program of patriotic education imposed in 2015 (People’s Council of the Luhansk People’s Republic, August 13, 2015; Donetsk People’s Republic Ministry of Education and Science, November 27, 2019).
Children are the future of any country. In ensuring their psychological allegiance to the aggressor state—whether it be through indoctrination or fear—early, Russia is wiping out the Ukrainian nationality through coopting educational systems and public spaces, in what seems like a wide-scale, long-term attempt to destroy it.
Russia is attempting to enforce the mass absorption of Russian political views by taking over every facet of a child’s life, slowly erasing the Ukrainian language and cultural identity, for which Ukrainian children are a vessel for the future (see EDM, March 7, 2024, February 19, March 3). Occupiers are enforcing collective pride in the identity of the occupier and association with the aggressor in shared physical spaces, while cultivating an atmosphere of fear, shame, and secrecy around children’s own inherited cultures.
By penalizing children for cultural beliefs absorbed in the home, Russia is attempting to eradicate familial culture passed down by the parents, as parents often do not want to risk the safety and prospects of their children. They will therefore start self-censoring and end up complicit in the eradication of their own selfhood. Individual minds and the families and communities they compose are just another site of Russian colonization through terror, to erase the Ukrainian identity—and thus, the country’s future.
