Hundreds of Ukrainian children from territories seized by the invading Russian army have allegedly been sent to Kremlin-backed military boot camps training them to fight for Moscow, according to a disturbing new report.
Ukrainian teens were showcased on Moscow’s OTR channel assembling and firing Kalashnikov assault rifles at a camp in southern Russia’s Volgograd region, where about 330 Ukrainian kids are being trained, the Times reports.
The unsettling new footage included the children receiving weapons and drone operation training from a masked instructor, all while the Russian flag and a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin loomed in the backdrop.
The video also showed an apparent endorsement of the camp from a Ukrainian girl touting her instructors, who all have combat experience fighting against Ukrainians.
“They can really teach you something here,” the 16-year-old girl, from the Kherson region, says as she learns to fly a drone.
It’s unclear if the child was forced to provide the soundbite under duress. A girl with her same name, age and native region as the teen in the report is listed on the Ukrainian government’s Children of War database.
OTR, a state-controlled outlet, said the Ukrainian kids at the camp were all from the territories being occupied in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The camp, which is typically attended by Russian children ages 14 to 17, is reportedly operated by the Moscow organization Voin, founded at Putin’s order, to produce “a new generation of patriots who love their motherland.”
Along with the camp in Volgograd, dozens of Ukrainian teens have been sent to similar military camps in Tyumen and Kalmykia, according to Voin.
Hundreds of other Ukrainian children have also been sent to Chechnya for military training as part of a separate program since 2022.
Ukrainian officials have warned of this developing following reports last year of kidnapped children being sent to Russian “re-education” camps were they allegedly suffer physical and sexual violence as they’re forced to intake Russian propaganda.
Dmytro Lubinets, Kyiv’s top human rights official, has accused Moscow of orchestrating a nationwide brainwashing program to transform children into “full-fledged soldiers” that could turn against their own country.
“The Kremlin is forcibly forming a generation of Ukrainian children that is taught hatred and violence against everything Ukrainian,” Lubinets told The Times.
Like Putin, the Kremlin’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova has been charged by the International Criminal Court for war crimes related to the abduction of Ukrainian children
Russia has denied the allegations but previously admitted to taking in more than 700,000 Ukrainian children from occupied territories since the war began.