Researchers have identified more than 200 institutions in Russia where Russians «re-educate» children deported from Ukraine

Children involved in a Russian military centre «Unarmy». Photo: Yunarmiya/Telegram

Russia has created a large-scale system of institutions for the «re-education of» abducted Ukrainian children. Yale University researchers have identified at least 210 such institutions in Russia and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. However, this figure is not final and may be higher.

This is stated in a report by the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Laboratory (Yale HRL).

According to the researchers, the actual number of such institutions may exceed 210, as the investigation is still ongoing.

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The identified institutions have been operating since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, but it is still unknown how many Ukrainian children are being held there.

These locations include cadet schools, military bases, medical facilities, religious institutions, schools, universities, hotels, orphanages and family support centres. Most often, these are camps and sanatoriums.

In at least 130 institutions, children are subjected to «re-education» through pro-Russian cultural, patriotic and military programmes.

Ukrainian children there are forced to sing the Russian national anthem, participate in propaganda activities, listen to lectures on history and geopolitics, and all education is conducted in Russian.

Separately, 39 institutions have been documented where children were forced to undergo militarised programmes with military training. Although officially intended for adolescents aged 14 and over, children aged 8 to 17 are actually involved.

Such programmes include firearms and maritime training, shooting competitions, grenade throwing, tactical medicine training, and drone flying. In particular, the researchers recorded a case where children from Donetsk region were sent to a military base for «airborne training». They were taken there by an aircraft belonging to the Property Management Department of the Russian Presidential Administration.

Yale University stressed that more than half of the institutions listed in the report are directly run by the Russian authorities. At least 106 of them are managed by federal or local authorities of the Russian Federation.

As a reminder, Ukrainian investigators have completed an investigation into the abduction of children by Russians from the Novopetrivsk special school in Mykolaiv region.

Earlier, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that there are no Russian children in Ukraine. This was his response to the Russian demand, voiced during the talks in Istanbul, to allegedly return 20 children from Russia and another 30 residents of the Kursk region.