‘They teach them to hate their parents’

How the Russian authorities forcibly deport and ‘re-educate’ Ukrainian children

According to Ukraine’s National Information Bureau, as of the start of May 2023, more than 19,000 Ukrainian children have been deported from occupied territories since the start of the full-scale war. So far, only 364 of these minors have been returned to their parents. In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their alleged complicity in the illegal deportations of children, which the court has recognized as a war crime. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) also says the documented evidence of the deportations “matches with the international definition of genocide.” The Russian authorities, meanwhile, have claimed that they’re not deporting Ukrainian children but “evacuating” them from the conflict zone for their own safety. In a new article, the Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda laid out in detail how these deportations work and how the Russian government attempts to indoctrinate deported children into hating Ukraine. In English, Meduza summarizes the report’s main points.

How the forced transfers work

According to reports from witnesses and volunteers, Russia has multiple ways of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia and Russian-controlled territories. The Russian authorities abduct students from orphanages, separate children from their parents at “filtration” camps, and use families’ poor living conditions as a pretext for taking minors from their parents. Russian propaganda, meanwhile, maintains that the children are taken to “recreation camps” in safe areas.

To legalize the process in Russia, the State Duma passed laws simplifying the processes for children and their legal representatives to obtain Russian citizenship and for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children.

“Not one of the decrees issued by Putin contains a paragraph or a rule that says the child’s consent or opinion is required,” explains Oksana Filipishina, a representative for the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. “In other words, there’s been no backtracking that would indicate the ‘Putin government’ has tried to adhere to the norms of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These are essentially acts of unilateral violence intended to transfer children from one ethnic group to another. And that’s a sign of genocide.”

How deported children are ‘re-educated’

Occupation authorities in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions have frequently offered families free “vacation” vouchers for their children. According to Ukrainska Pravda, many residents have accepted these offers. Children with parents are usually taken to recreational camps or special schools in Russia or in Ukraine’s annexed territories, while orphans are usually sent to boarding schools or medical institutions.

According to human rights workers, after children are separated from their families, they’re immersed in messages like “You don’t need parents” and “You have no future in Ukraine.” “They say that Ukraine has abandoned [the children]. They teach them to hate their parents, and then [to hate] our country, and then to love Russia,” said Miroslava Kharchenko, a lawyer for the Save Ukraine project, which facilitates the return of deported children to Ukraine.

“Every morning, they played the Russian national anthem, and we had to stand for it. Anyone who didn’t stand had to give a written explanation. They also told us from the start that we weren’t allowed to talk about Ukraine,” said Ekaterina, a 13-year-old from Kherson who asked her parents to let her go to a camp in Yevpatoria. She was initially told she would spend just two weeks there, but the authorities refused to let her go back to her parents after the Russian military fled Kherson.

“Valery Astakhov, the head of security, said that they were going to bomb Kyiv, and that Kherson would become Russian again. When we asked when they would send us home, they wouldn’t give a clear answer. There were also rumors that they might send us to a boarding school. That was the scariest part,” Ekaterina told Ukrainska Pravda.

A 16-year-old from Beryslav named Vitaly who was sent to a camp in Crimea told journalists: “When they brought us there, they said, ‘Ukraine is made up of terrorists who kill people.’ They beat us with rods for saying, ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ They cursed at us and called us ‘khokhols’ [a derogatory term for Ukrainians]. When one girl hung a Ukrainian flag in her room, they burned it.”

The older teenagers said they did their best to resist the Russian propaganda and the camps’ “re-education” techniques. “When they played the Russian national anthem, we played the Ukrainian national anthem through our headphones and listened to that,” said Vitaly.

“On New Year’s, they showed us Putin’s address, and some people left the room and started shouting, ‘Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!’ said 16-year-old Taisia from Kherson. She told journalists that children who refused to obey their instructors were locked in “isolation rooms” for multiple days. “It’s a room with a bed. They put you there, take your phone, lock the door, and you sit in the empty room,” she said.

Many younger children were influenced by the propaganda, according to Ukrainska Pravda. Some of them reportedly began expressing support for Russia, wearing t-shirts with the letter Z, and stopped wanting to return home. Others continued to talk about how life in the camps was “wonderful” even after going back to Ukraine, saying that they were “well-fed and taken on excursions throughout Crimea.”

“What are their recent memories of Ukraine? Shelling, the cold, death. So, some of them didn’t want to go back,” said Oksana Filipishina. “But that’s manipulation. First, they came to our land, killed [the children’s] parents, bombed homes, forced people to starve and to lose everything… And now they’re ‘liberators.’”

Reporting by Ukrainska Pravda