Russia is forcing the children that it’s kidnapped from Ukraine to fight against their own country once they turn 18 as part of a direct order from President Vladimir Putin, Kyiv officials said.
Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, said soldiers on the battlefield are coming face-to-face with the young men, with one rescued 19-year-old recounting the Kremlin’s re-education process that he was made to endure for three years, the Times of London reported.
“We were made to sing the Russian anthem every morning, then physical training — jumps, squats, running, crawling — and we also learned how to shoot,” Vlad Rudenko told the outlet.
“The 16- and 17-year-olds were given dummy rifles and the older ones used live ammunition,” he added.
Rudenko was one of the many children who were taken from their homes when Russian soldiers stormed through the southern town of Kherson in October 2022.
He was only 16 when the foreign troops found him hiding in his mother’s apartment, taking the boy by gunpoint and transferring him to a re-education camp in occupied Crimea, where he and other children underwent combat training.
Rudenko, who was smuggled over the frontlines with the help of his mother last year, considered himself lucky when compared to some of the other 35,000 children Russia has kidnapped.
“The Russians didn’t manage to take anything from me though, they just deprived me of my childhood,” he said. “I am lucky, because there are Ukrainians now who are fighting against their own people.”
Yermak, who slammed Moscow as a “terroristic regime,” said the kidnapping and re-education of countless Ukrainian children serves two goals.
The first is for Russia to fill its ranks with expendable soldiers as Moscow continues to beef up its military numbers in the face of hundreds of deaths a week along the frontlines.
The second is far more sinister: to force Ukrainian soldiers to fight against their own children, Yermak said.
The top Ukrainian official confirmed that soldiers have already begun identifying the bodies of their own countrymen on the opposing side of the battlefields.
“The Russians want to destroy the new generation of the Ukrainians, and they are building new soldiers against the country where they were born. It is terrible,” he said. “Putin’s goal is [that] he doesn’t want Ukraine to exist.”
Experts at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab helped Kyiv raise the alarms of Russia’s mass kidnapping and re-education ploy last month.
The US research team has been working to keep track of Ukrainian children that have disappeared since the start of Russia’s 2022 war on Kyiv and has identified dozens of “Russification” camps — at least 13 in Belarus and 43 in Russian-annexed Crimea and across mainland Russia.
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There, the kids are indoctrinated into Putin’s ideal citizens and raised to speak Russian and not their native Ukrainian.
Some of the children have been shown on Russian state TV being paraded around Moscow, with even the Kremlin’s Children’s Rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, publicly bragging about adopting a boy from the city of Mariupol, which was seized in 2022 following a bloody, months-long siege.
The mass kidnappings are among the charges that led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin back in 2023.
