Russia’s Campaign to Turn Kids Into Killers
Russia is building a human weapons factory, and children are the raw material. This is not about fostering patriotism. It is Kremlin’s assembly line designed to mass produce a generation fueled by hatred, conditioned for sacrifice, and loyal only to the regime’s vision of perpetual conflict.
This war is being waged on multiple fronts, targeting the children of the occupied and the children of the aggressor alike, using methods perfected under totalitarian rule.
“Re-educating” Ukrainian Children
In the occupied regions of Ukraine, Russian authorities have turned schools and summer camps into engines of indoctrination and militarization.
Children are militarized starting from preschool. In schools, they receive real military training and not to defend, but to attack and kill.
Russia is erasing Ukrainian identity, replacing it with a militant, pro Kremlin ideology. According to a recent investigation, the Kremlin allocated nearly $840 million in 2025 for that purpose.
Mandatory “Fatherland Security and Defense” classes, led by soldiers or masked instructors with names that sound exactly like military nicknames, “Sarmat”, for example, teach students to disassemble weapons such as Kalashnikov rifles and Makarov pistols. Young people are not only being trained. They’re being groomed to see violence as patriotic, and to “take revenge.”
Beyond the school day, so called integration camps function as ideological pressure cookers. Youth are submerged in militaristic propaganda and aggressively steered toward future enlistment. Those who show dissent or skepticism are targeted. Resistance can lead to terrifying consequences, including forced committal to psychiatric institutions, a chilling echo of Soviet punitive medicine.
School students in Simferopol, Crimea, are reportedly being forced to produce weapons for the Russian army.
Russia is rapidly expanding its VOIN, or “Warrior,” network—a state program designed to militarize and indoctrinate Ukrainian youth in the territories it occupies. The program’s growth is explosive. After training around 11,000 cadets in all of 2024, it reportedly enrolled over 15,000 in just the first two months of this year.
This effort is intensely focused on occupied areas. In the ruins of Mariupol, for instance, Russia is building a massive VOIN campus on a 15-hectare site where they destroyed a children’s summer camp, complete with residential barracks and military training grounds. The objective is to systematically erase Ukrainian identity, cultivating a new generation loyal to the Kremlin and prepared to serve their occupier’s military.
Kidnapping Ukrainian Children
The most heinous crime in this campaign is the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Stripped of their nationality and heritage, they are forcibly adopted and remolded into citizens of the state that destroyed their homes. The UN has flagged this monstrous act as a war crime and a component of genocide.
Since 2014, children from the occupied territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea have been systematically taken from their homes and placed with Russian families near Moscow and in other regions of Russia. Most of these children were born before the occupation and held Ukrainian citizenship. Tragically, many of their parents were killed by the occupying forces.
The occupying authorities of the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic” have created an online catalog of Ukrainian children, according to former Ukrainian Children’s Rights Commissioner Dmytro Kuleba.
The catalog on the website allows users to select children as if they were choosing products from a store. All photographs show the children’s faces clearly and openly. Visitors to the site can filter the children by gender, hair or eye color. The children are described using disturbing criteria such as “neat,” “obedient,” and “socialized.”
This cruel system effectively commodifies these children, stripping them of their identities and treating them as objects to be assigned and relocated.
Militarization of Russian Kids
Simultaneously, a parallel process is unfolding within Russia’s own borders, transforming its own children into an ideological arsenal for the state. A nationwide mandate for Basic Military Training (BMT) has turned schoolyards into makeshift firing ranges. From a young age, Russian children are taught to handle hand grenades, fire assault rifles, and operate combat drones.
This practical training is reinforced by relentless psychological conditioning. Weekly “Conversations about Important Things,” a compulsory part of the curriculum, serve as government-scripted lessons in ultranationalism. They present a distorted reality of Russian history and a geopolitical doctrine that paints the West as a relentless enemy.
The result is a domestic population raised in a culture of state worship, taught to see the outside world with fear and hostility, and prepared to accept war as a national duty.
Russia is putting war criminals in schools to teach children, turning those responsible for atrocities into role models. Instead of protecting kids from the horrors of war, these individuals are used to spread propaganda and militarize the next generation.
In Saratov region, kids from a local kindergarten were used as practice dummies during a military-patriotic game called “Zarnitsa 2.0.”
This "game" has been happening all over Russia for two years now, and schoolkids are basically forced to take part.Last year alone, regions spent over 100 million rubles on running the event. On top of that, the government pours hundreds of millions into fake weapons and injury simulators to train kids. For example, just one federal program spent over 150 million rubles.
In 2025, a unified educational program designed by the Russian Ministry of Education took effect across all summer camps, making patriotic and military training mandatory even in private camps.
Beyond state-run camps, dozens of commercial military-patriotic programs promise kids an “unforgettable” summer filled with drill practice, drone operation, survival skills, and combat training, often charging tens of thousands of rubles.
In cities like Omsk and others, children as young as eight participate in realistic special forces simulations with strict discipline and no gadgets.
Camps in Krasnodar, Moscow, and Tver teach survival in the forest, marches, base defense, and first aid.
In the Moscow region, kids aged 10 to 13 spend two weeks at a border outpost camp, learning military tactics from instructors with combat experience.
Even during summer break, Russian children are being actively prepared for war. War simulators are so realistic that children can’t wait to reenact everything in real life. They aren’t scared because they’ve done it millions of times since they were little and know exactly what to do. This isn’t just a game. It’s straight-up brainwashing.
The Rebirth of Stalin’s Pioneers
Stalin and Lenin were genocidal murderers whose cause was the relentless destruction of free nations to seize control. Not much has changed in modern Russia. Its cause remains the same as in those bloody times a century ago. Modern Russia’s children prove this.
The state-run youth movements of today are direct successors to Vladimir Lenin’s Young Pioneers, the mass youth organization later molded by Joseph Stalin to ensure total ideological loyalty to the Communist Party. This historical model of capturing children’s minds is now being deployed in the 21st century.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a deliberate effort has been underway in Russian schools to revive the cult of Joseph Stalin, replacing historical truth with propaganda. Children are told that Stalin was not a bloody dictator, but a “great strategist” and an inspiration for victory.
In Mytishchi, a lawmaker from the ruling Putin’s United Russia party gave a lecture to high school students about Stalin’s July 3, 1941 radio address, calling it a symbol of unity and heroism.
In Smolensk, a photo zone with Stalin’s portrait was set up in a school, while in the Vologda region, a bust of Stalin was installed at a school entrance next to a monument to Lenin.
In the Ryazan and Saratov regions, students were made to draw his portraits for a “Victory Portrait: 1944” contest, with school officials praising his “positive moral influence” during the war.
In the Rostov region, Stalin is listed among “great Russians” credited with winning World War II through industrialization and collectivization.
In the Khanty-Mansi region, students are told that in 1949 Stalin introduced the “best school uniform” made from expensive cashmere, banning lace aprons so girls wouldn’t look like “maids or waitresses.”
In Tatarstan, at a factory where teens assemble Iranian drones after ninth grade, a massive banner reads: “Kurchatov, Korolev, and Stalin live in your DNA.”
This is not nostalgia. It’s a systematic effort to normalize the image of a dictator.
The “Yunarmiya,” or Young Army, is a sprawling paramilitary organization disguised as a patriotic club, indoctrinating hundreds of thousands of children into a militaristic worldview.
More recently, the “Movement of the First,” launched in late 2022, serves as a direct reincarnation of the Young Pioneers. Its stated goal is to shape children’s values from their most formative years. In practice, it is a mechanism for ideological capture, enforcing conformity and ensuring that loyalty to the state supersedes all else. By resurrecting these tools, the Kremlin is admitting that its vision for the future is rooted in the darkest methods of its past.
Global Condemnation
Russia’s systematic militarization and ideological manipulation of children has triggered sharp condemnation from human rights organizations, international watchdogs, and Western governments alike.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised the alarm over Russia’s transfer of Ukrainian children into its territory and the methods used to “re-educate” them. In 2023, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russia’s actions may amount to war crimes, citing violations of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
These concerns were amplified when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, for their direct roles in the forced deportation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children. This was a historic move—the first time the ICC issued a warrant against the leader of a nuclear state.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has demanded full transparency from Russia and access for humanitarian observers. Russia, however, continues to deny wrongdoing and has not complied with international requests for data on the number and whereabouts of transferred children.
Groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Save the Children have been closely documenting Russia’s use of militarized youth training, particularly in the occupied Ukrainian territories.
Their findings include:
Coercive integration of Ukrainian children into Russian-run military-patriotic camps.
Use of psychological pressure and punishment for children who refuse to comply.
Attempts to strip Ukrainian children of their identity, replacing their names, passports, and histories.
Human Rights Watch has urged the global community to classify these actions not only as war crimes but potentially as crimes against humanity, citing the scale and systematic nature of the abuse.
Leaders across Europe and North America have strongly condemned the Russian state’s targeting of children:
- European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called Russia’s actions “a despicable strategy of war,” highlighting the psychological trauma inflicted on children being “torn away from their homes and taught to hate their homeland.”
- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the deportation and militarization of Ukrainian children as part of a “broader campaign of cultural erasure,” asserting that these tactics are aimed at breaking the future of Ukraine.
- The UK government labeled the indoctrination programs “a grotesque abuse of children,” announcing sanctions against individuals and organizations involved in these efforts.
What Russia is doing is not simply ideological brainwashing. It’s a long-term weaponization of childhood, a deliberate effort to transform the next generation into foot soldiers of imperialism.
This strategy doesn’t just aim to erase Ukrainian identity. It also creates generations of militarized, radicalized youth who are conditioned to view the West, democracy, and freedom as threats.
The global community sees this not only as a Ukrainian tragedy but as a harrowing warning of what happens when children become the frontline victims of authoritarian regimes.
