They play hockey, visit a toy factory, receive gifts, and perform goofy dances. But they also train with automatic weapons, ride on armored personnel carriers, commemorate the Soviet Union, and learn a Russian pop song that proclaims, "Russia is behind us."
Belarus's organized vacations for children from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine are not just about escaping life in a combat zone. The trips come with a mission, evidence gathered by RFE/RL's Belarus Service and Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, indicates: teaching young Ukrainians to identify with concepts that both Moscow and Minsk promote.
In a November 2023 study of Ukrainian schoolchildren's escorted trips to Belarus, the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab deemed the transfers "systematic deportation" coordinated by Belarus and Russia as part of the two countries' so-called Union State. The study said the process involves "re-education," which it defined as "the promotion of cultural, historical, societal, and patriotic messages or ideas that serve the political interests" of both regimes. Military training, including by Interior Ministry troops, occurred with "at least six groups of children," according to the report.
"They are assisting the Russian Federation in eradicating the national identity of Ukrainian children," charged Ukrainian human rights lawyer Kateryna Rashevska, who called the vacations "a targeted operation" against Ukrainian children. "In their militarization. In their desire not to return to Ukraine, in turning these children into enemies of their own nation."
Authoritarian Belarus leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka, whose childhood town of Alyaksandryya has been a trip destination, asserts that it's all about good-hearted charity. At a 2024 New Year's celebration, he assured Ukrainian and other children that "there are no alien children in Belarus."
In their November report, titled Belarus' Collaboration with Russia in the Systematic Deportation of Ukraine's Children and published by the U.S. State Department supported Conflict Observatory, the Yale researchers estimated that between February 2022 and the end of October 2023 at least 2,442 Ukrainian children were transported from 17 towns in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine to 13 Belarusian locations, including five "health camps."
RFE/RL identified 50 of these Ukrainian children by examining e-mails from the Belarusian Red Cross, a key trip organizer, that were obtained by Cyber Partisans, a group of anonymous hackers that opposes Lukashenka's government.
Orphans and children without parental care also number among the transported Ukrainian children, according to reports on Belarusian state TV.
But unlike transfers of Ukrainian children to Russia, which led the International Criminal Court to issue war-crimes arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, Belarus' program "appears to rely on multiple non-state actors," the Yale study said.
For some time, one of those nonstate actors was the Belarusian mission of UNICEF, the United Nations child-welfare agency, which financed two August 2022 camps for Ukrainian children in Belarus.
A March 16, 2023, Belarusian Foreign Ministry press release stated that UNICEF financed a summer 2022 program, May run by the Belarusian Red Cross, for the "recuperation" of Ukrainian children and for their "preparation for the school year."
A 2022 Belarusian Red Cross document specifies that an August 9-26, 2022, camp in the western Hrodna region, Beryozka, was part of this program. A second camp, Lipki, was held on August 6-23, 2022, near the northeastern city of Vitsebsk.
A video posted on an Instagram channel featuring the Lipki camp shows children in August 2022 riding on a Belarusian armored personnel carrier and in a troop carrier at the nearby Losvido training ground.
Some photos from Beryozka on Telegram have a similar theme, with children in bulletproof vests holding automatic weapons and a young boy with what appears to be a police pistol.
Other images show Beryozka children in August 2022 singing Kombat, a song by the Russian rock group Lyube that glorifies the Russian role in World War II.
UNICEF headquarters and its representative office in Belarus did not respond to RFE/RL's questions about UNICEF Belarus's involvement with these camps.
In a statement released the day after the RFE/RL report was published on February 22, UNICEF's Europe and Central Asia Regional Office acknowledged that UNICEF had cooperated with the Belarusian Red Cross between February 2022 and February 2023 to provide "education, mental health and psychosocial support, information counseling and child-centered recreation activities" for 1,421 Ukrainian children and 739 caregivers "legally residing in Belarus."
It did not explain how UNICEF had confirmed that these children legally resided in Belarus but emphasized it does not condone the international transfer of Ukrainian children.
"UNICEF never supports cross-border movements for recreational purposes, as this may lead to children being separated from their families, can delay reunification, and poses other risks during a time of conflict," the statement read. "We continue to be deeply concerned about incidents of cross-border movement of children that may put them at risk."
In its May 2023 press release, however, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry indicated that two UNICEF representatives -- Rustam Khaidarov, head of UNICEF Belarus, and Artashes Mirzoyan, an adviser to the UNICEF Europe and Central Asia Regional Office – previously were aware of the camps.
The ministry claimed that Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Azarevych discussed with the men what it described as the "growing politicization" of international discussions about Belarus "welcoming children from foreign states to recuperation in summer camps."
UNICEF Belarus's 2022 report states that "volunteers" organized "recreational and educational activities in 7 summer camps for approximately 90 refugee children," but did not identify the children's country of origin.
In its statement, UNICEF's Europe and Central Asia Regional Office did not address the August 2022 camps. Ukraine's human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said UNICEF Belarus had "stopped funding [the camp program] completely" after August 2022.
The Belarusian Red Cross remains at the forefront of transfers of Ukrainian children to Belarus. The International Federation of Red Cross and Crescent Societies suspended the organization in December 2023 after it refused to remove its general secretary for his statements "on the movement of children to Belarus," among other things.
That general secretary, Dzmitry Shautsou, and another transfer organizer, Paralympian Alyaksey Talai, head of the Alyaksey Talai Charitable Foundation, now face U.S.and European Union sanctions for "assisting Russian government efforts" related to "the forced transfer" and "the deportation and the military indoctrination of Ukrainian children, including in Belarus."
Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention on Civilians, to which Belarus is a party, forbids "individual or mass forcible transfers" and "deportations of protected persons" from occupied territory to locations abroad.
Parents of several children from Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas -- Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions -- told RFE/RL they welcomed the trips.
"We were glad that the children went," Oksana Teplikh, whose two adolescent children, Saveliy and Sofia, traveled to Belarus in August 2022 from Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine's Luhansk region. Aside from Belarus, the trips included travel to the Russian cities of Moscow and Kazan, she said.
"Information came from that side that children were being taken away without the knowledge of their parents," Teplikh said, referring to the Ukrainian government. "It's all a delusion."
The Belarusian Red Cross documents contained a parental consent form for a boy who traveled to Belarus from a Russian-occupied part of the Donetsk region, but RFE/RL could not establish that such forms are used systematically.
Russian-imposed authorities in the Donetsk region have issued parental consent forms that authorize "multiple" trips to and from Luhansk and Russian-occupied Crimea as well as to Dagestan in Russia's North Caucasus and to Abkhazia, a Russian-allied breakaway region of Georgia where Russia maintains troops.
Such forms, however, have no validity under international law, which does not recognize Russia's claims to any part of Ukraine or the authority of occupation officials.
Kyiv's repeated objections to the organized removal of children from Ukraine mean that "such consent is null" and does not negate "evidence of deportation," said Rashevska, who works for the Regional Center for Human Rights, a Kyiv nonprofit formerly based in Crimea.
Even if a Ukrainian child returns to his or her Russian-occupied place of residence, their trip to Belarus qualifies as deportation, Lubinets agreed.
Parents from Russian-occupied areas who spoke to RFE/RL did not say their children had been deported. It was impossible to determine whether they spoke freely.
Schools create lists of interested children and then tell parents what documents are needed, said Ivan Vorobyov, a resident of Mariupol, which Russian forces seized in May 2022 after a siege that killed thousands of civilians and razed much of the Azov Sea coast city. Vorobyov's 12-year-old daughter, Kira, spent three weeks in 2023 in the Dubrava camp, run by state-owned potash-fertilizer manufacturer Belruskali outside Minsk.
Belarusian state media cast the country as a safe haven amid the fighting in neighboring Ukraine, where Russia launched its large-scale invasion in February 2022 after seizing Crimea and starting a war in the Donbas in 2014.
In a November 2023 report on Belarus-1 television, one trip chaperone, Natalya Neshchadim, claimed Ukrainian children visiting Belarus "do not want to leave" since they have "seen security here."
Aside from bombardments, life in Russian-held parts of Ukraine includes periodic power outages and hot-water cutoffs as well as unreliable Internet and cell-phone connections, parents told RFE/RL.
Parents understandably could think "that their children will be better off in Belarus," said Volha Vyalichka, a Belarusian psychologist who was forced into exile for her criticism of the authorities and her role as an independent observer in the deeply disputed presidential election in 2020. "But they don't think about how they will be entertained, what cultural programs there will be, what will be put into their heads."
In June 2022, children from the Donbas visited the Belarusian Interior Ministry's special forces unit No. 3214, which participated in the brutal crackdown on protesters following the 2020 election in which Lukashenka claimed a landslide victory and a sixth term amid evidence of large-scale fraud in his favor.
In December 2022, 46 children from the Donetsk region laid flowers at a Minsk monument marking the centennial of the Soviet Union's founding. A July 2023 photo on Instagram that shows children visiting an apparent World War II military site bears the inscription "For Stalin!"
A leader of the Belarusian opposition in exile, Pavel Latushka, said he presented a dossier to the International Criminal Court in November 2023 that he says implicates Lukashenka in the illegal transfer of children from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine to Belarus, but at this point the ICC has issued no warrant for his arrest.
Belarusian Foreign Ministry spokesman Anatol Hlaz described the U.S. sanctions imposed in December 2023 over the transfer of these children as "pressure, racketeering, and blackmail."
In late January, one of the trip organizers, the Paralympian Talai, announced that his foundation plans to bring children from the Kherson region to Belarusian camps as well.
To stop the transfer of children from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, Lubinets said Kyiv needs to find "partners" -- particularly, international organizations focused on children -- "who can help us protect the rights of our children on the territory of any country."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's commissioner for children's rights and rehabilitation, Darya Herasimchuk, said she believes the only way to stop such transfers is to defeat Russia in the war.
"Ukraine must win, period," said Herasimchuk. "We can stop every action toward Ukrainian children only with victory. There is no other way out."
