Report: Russia weaponizes Ukrainian children through forced ‘re-education’ camps

When Russia is “re-educating” Ukrainian children in occupied territories, it is referring to a system of forced removals without parental consent, political indoctrination, and military training that is designed to eradicate Ukrainian identity. 

It’s a practice that violates international humanitarian law and may constitute a war crime, according to a new report. 

Russia’s program of transferring children from occupied Ukrainian territories into so-called re-education camps is part of a deliberate state policy that seeks to dismantle Ukraine as a nation, the report finds.

The analysis, “Weaponization of Children: Re-Education Camps,” was published by the Kyiv-based Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR).

“To achieve this goal, the aggressor state has repurposed hundreds of medical, educational, and recreational institutions,” the authors write. “In most of them, children are militarized and subjected to systematic political indoctrination.”

The report documents how Ukrainian children are removed from their families or prevented from returning home, taught Russian state ideology, pressured to abandon their language and national identity, and exposed to military training and propaganda.

Cases of children being taken for “re-education” were recorded even before Russia’s full-scale invasion, including at the initiative of Russia-backed authorities in the occupied parts of the easternmost Luhansk and Donetsk regions. As well as the Alexei Talai Foundation in Belarus.

Between October 2022 and March 2023, Russia illegally held Ukrainian children in re-education camps for extended periods, blocking reunification with their families. While many relocations since 2023 have been framed as temporary, the report finds the practice has become systematic and widespread.

“The primary objective has become the weaponization of children — their reformatting to serve Russia’s imperial ambitions by preparing future human resources for new wars of aggression,” the report found.

The analysis is based on monitoring the experiences of Ukrainian children in re-education camps between 2023 and 2025. It details the mechanisms of militarization and indoctrination and provides a legal assessment of the practice under international law.

Read the full report at the following link.