According to Ukraine’s ombudsman for children’s rights, it may be about a total of 200,000 – 300,000 children and young people who have been abducted. So far, it has been possible to identify 19,546 of them, but only barely 400 have been able to be returned to Ukraine.
SVT has met Rostyslav, a teenager who was forced into a military youth camp where he was trained to become a Russian soldier.
– Every morning we had to sing the Russian national anthem. If we didn’t sing, we were punished, he says.
In the end, Rostyslav managed to escape from the camp with the help of the organization Save Ukraine, which works to return abducted children back to Ukraine. It often involves socially vulnerable children from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. Many of them have lived in institutions. Since they have few or no relatives, the risk is less that someone will look for them.
“Occurs systematically”
– The Russification of the children takes place systematically. There is evidence that their Ukrainian documents are changed to Russian and not infrequently their first and last names are changed to make it difficult to find them, says Vladyslav Havrylov who is a war crimes investigator at the PR Army in Ukraine.
Through open sources, he and his colleagues have found 60 camps where Ukrainian children are indoctrinated and given new identity documents.
– These camps are not only along the Ukrainian border, but all over Russia, even as far away as Vladivostok in East Asia, says Havrylov, showing us pictures of facilities and their positions on an interactive map.
Teenagers are sent to camps
While the younger children are then often adopted by Russian families, the teenagers are sent on to other camps run by paramilitary groups where they are trained to become soldiers.
– It is about young people aged 14-17 who are supposed to be a resource for mobilization for the Russian army’s war in Ukraine, says Vladyslav Havrylov.
Hear Rostyslav talk about his time in the Russian youth camp in the video.
