A US report alleges that there is a network of Russian camps with the mission of “re-educating” Ukrainian children according to the intellectual standards set by Moscow. More than 6 thousand children would be in the places.
Since the start of the war almost a year ago, thousands of children, including babies as young as four months old, have reportedly been taken and distributed to 43 camps across Russia.
Deployed from Crimea to Siberia, the centers would be aimed at “pro-Russian patriotic and military education”, according to the document funded by the US Department of State and prepared by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab – Laboratory of Humanitarian Research of the School of Yale Public Health.
In these “re-education” centers, the report points out, children would have school curricula with a pro-Moscow ideological perspective. Students would be taken to see patriotic sites and attend lectures by veterans.
According to Nathaniel Raymond, co-author of the Yale report, the children would also receive military training, although no evidence was found that they were being taken to war.
The report adds that hundreds of these children are held in the camps beyond their scheduled return date. The document also states that the process of adopting and raising Ukrainian boys and girls would have been accelerated “unnecessarily”, in what could constitute a war crime.
“The mounting evidence of Russia’s actions exposes the Kremlin’s goals to deny and suppress Ukraine’s identity, history and culture,” the US State Department said in a statement.
“The devastating impacts of Putin’s war on Ukraine’s children will be felt for generations,” he stresses.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price reiterated that the report “details the systematic and government-wide efforts of Russia to permanently relocate thousands of Ukrainian children to areas under Russian control through a network of 43 fields and other facilities”.
“In many cases, Russia intended to temporarily take children from Ukraine under the guise of a free summer camp, only to then refuse to return them and cut off all contact with the families,” argues Price.
Pressure on families
The report cites Putin advisers, such as Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights, who has reportedly announced the adoption of 350 children by Russian families and that more than a thousand are awaiting confirmation of the process.
Russia’s embassy in Washington responded to the report’s findings in Telegram. “Russia accepted children who were forced to flee with their families from the bombings”, further claiming that: “we do our best to keep minors in families and, in cases of absence or death of parents and relatives – transfer the orphans under guardianship”.
The US document, however, contradicts these allegations, saying that some parents were pressured into giving consent to send their children away. Others, the report says, “are shipped with parental consent for an agreed period of days or weeks and returned to the family as originally scheduled” – but many are not.
“After calling the director of the camp, a mother was reportedly informed that the children could not be returned because there was a war,” details the investigation.
These Russian centers would also be making it difficult for the children to recover: the children would only be released if the parents came to physically pick them up; In addition to the price of the trip, there is a ban on men aged between 18 and 60 leaving Ukraine.
“A significant portion of these families have low incomes and do not have the financial conditions to make the trip. Some families were forced to sell belongings and travel across four countries to be reunited with their children,” the report found.
War crime
Russian activity “in some cases may constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity”, framed as child abduction and treatment of civilians during war, according to the Geneva Convention, defends investigator Nathaniel Raymond.
The Ukrainian authorities recently denounced that more than 14,700 children were deported to Russia and some were sexually exploited.
The report used interviews and gathered information with the help of satellite images and public accounts. The document makes it clear that the number of children sent to the camps is “probably significantly higher” than the confirmed 6,000.
The Humanitarian Research Laboratory (LPH) is a group of faculty and students dedicated to investigating and addressing humanitarian crises around the world. The LPH at the Yale School of Public Health seeks to document alleged violations of international law and crimes against humanity.
