Russia has threatened to remove children from their parents in an anti-war dissent crackdown. 

Children have been forced to flee the country, face jail sentences and be placed in orphanages as the pressure piles on parents who dare to question the Kremlin. 

Amnesty International said that “the very bond between children and their parents that is being shamelessly exploited to crush dissent”. 

“In this politically motivated assault on children, schools and teachers have become tools of persecution and arbitrary interference by the state,” Oleg Kozlovsky, Amnesty’s Russia researcher, said. 

He added that schools were indoctrinating children with “false government-mandated narratives”.

In many cases known to Amnesty, commissioners for children’s rights did not intervene in the politically motivated persecution of children or advocate for their right to freedom of expression.

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