How Russia Prepares Children In Occupied Ukraine For War Against Their Own Country

Russia is using a militaristic youth organization, Yunarmia, to foster the loyalty of teenagers in occupied parts of Ukraine and prepare them to fight in Moscow's war against their native country.

The development of Yunarmia amid the full-scale invasion is evidenced by previously unpublished documents from the Russian occupation authorities that were obtained by the Ukrainian hacker group KibOrg and provided to Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, and its media partners.

Yunarmia, or Youth Army, was created in 2016 at the initiative of then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and says it has 1.3 million members. Children as young as 8 can join its ranks by filling out a questionnaire in a mobile application.

The organization claims it facilitates the spiritual, moral, social, and intellectual development of the so-called Yunarmia cadets. It also says it "forms a positive motivation to fulfill the constitutional duty and prepares young men for service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation."

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with members of Yunarmia in September 2019.

In 2017, Yunarmia cadets marched alongside soldiers at the May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow, with President Vladimir Putin presiding. This year, Yunarmia children from the Russian-occupied Luhansk region took part in military celebrations in the Russian city of Novosibirsk.

Russia opened the first Yunarmia branch in the occupied territories of Ukraine in Crimea months after the organization's official formation. By September 2016, Yunarmia had spread across the Black Sea peninsula, according to Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at the Almenda Center Of Civic Education, a Ukrainian group whose activities include documenting violations of the rights of children in wartime.

In 2014, Russia occupied Crimea and fomented war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine -- the Donbas.

'Militarized Reeducation'

Yunarmia "was created with the specific idea of the militarized reeducation of not only Russian [children] but also Ukrainian children from the occupied territories," said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, which was forced to move from Crimea to Kyiv after the Russian occupation.

By January 2022, a month before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yunarmia had 29,000 members in Crimea alone, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Two boys from Yunarmia hold guns at an event in Sevastopol, on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, in August 2019.

Ukrainian law enforcement has charged Yunarmia leadership in occupied Crimea with violating the protection of civilians guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions, citing an article that prohibits "propaganda aimed at ensuring the voluntary enlistment of civilians."

Iryna Sedova, an expert of the Crimean Human Rights Group, supports the official indictment.

"We consider the activities of this organization to violate international humanitarian law, and the leaders of this organization are committing a war crime against the residents of Crimea, and in particular, children and teenagers whom they zombify and de facto involuntarily involve in Yunarmia," she told RFE/RL's Crimea.Realities in 2022.

In response to the accusations, the head of the Sevastopol branch of Yunarmia, Volodymyr Kovalenko, said he considers the current Ukrainian government illegitimate and denied he has committed any crime.

Yet, since the invasion, some former Yunarmia members from occupied areas have joined the Russian military and fought in Russia's war against Ukraine.

Among them: Illya Zozulskiy, 23, a native of the Crimean village of Poltavka and an artilleryman who has been awarded the prestigious Zhukov Medal, according to Russian media. The Russian outlet Mash reported in January 2023 that he was one of 50 "mentors" from Yunarmia who were fighting in the war.

Zozulskiy did not respond to calls or messages from Schemes and its media partners.

Britain announced sanctions targeting Yunarmia on November 19, calling it a "Russian paramilitary organization central to Putin's attempts to forcibly deport and indoctrinate Ukraine's younger generation." It said the organization is "involved in Russia's systematic attempt to erase Ukrainian cultural and national identity."

The sanctions announcement came amid reports that the Russian military has for the first time drafted people from occupied parts of Ukraine as conscripts.

Yunarmia itself began operating in the Donbas only after Putin baselessly claimed in September 2022 that the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, along with the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions farther southwest, were parts of Russia. Since 2019, though, a similar group called Young Guard-Yunarmia has been in place.

In 2023, Yunarmia "houses" -- school premises adapted for firearms and sports training -- were opened in Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. According to documents provided by KibOrg, Yunarmia uses the school buildings free of charge, with financial backing and other support coming from the Russian federal government and the Yunarmia headquarters in Moscow.

'The Reality Of Our Region'

Schemes received a dozen school records of children living in the occupied areas from KibOrg. Most of the children listed either belong to Yunarmia or participate in its activities.

An example is an eighth grader from one of the Russian-occupied cities in the Donetsk region whose name is being withheld to protect the privacy of a minor. According to his hometown's social media page, he took part in a training camp called Guardian-2024 and won a bronze medal for disassembling and reassembling an AK-74 rifle.

Participants "practiced shooting and received basic military training, studied modern tactics and methods of warfare," according to the post. It also said that "more than 300 schoolchildren" from Russia and the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhya regions "took the oath of allegiance to Yunarmia."

Former members of Young Guard-Yunarmia from the occupied part of the Donetsk region are fighting in the war.

Stanislav Sikorskiy of Horlivka, who graduated from high school in 2018, was a member of both Yunarmia and Young Guard-Yunarmia, according to the latter's account on the social network VKontakte. After Russia's full-scale invasion, he "was in the ranks" of the Russian military and fought in battles in the Kherson region, it said.

Sikorskiy was demobilized in 2023. He did not respond to messages and calls from Schemes' media partners.

Hanna Lisovenko, also from the Donetsk region, joined a Young Guard-Yunarmia unit called Spartans in 2017, when she was 17. Her social media posts indicate she is now fighting against Ukraine as a drone operator in a tactical group of Russian military intelligence consisting mainly of Donetsk region militants involved in the war since 2014.

"I was in Yunarmia myself, and now I serve in the army. About half of those who studied with me chose the military path. Unfortunately, many of them have already died. Some have been seriously wounded and cannot continue their service," she told Schemes' media partners. "This is the reality of our region."

Lisovenko said the "skills in handling weapons, physical training, and the history education" she acquired in Young Guard-Yunarmia proved useful during the full-scale war against Ukraine.

Zozulskiy, Sikorskiy, and Lisovenko are from parts of Ukraine that have been controlled by Russia for a decade. But Yunarmia also operates in areas that Russian forces occupied after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

An image from the Yunarmia branch in Mariupol, Ukraine, which Russian forces occupied after a long and devastating siege in the spring of 2022.

This past summer, its newly opened Mariupol branch held seven sessions at a camp on the Azov Sea. Among other things, the children were taught to shoot with assault rifles.

One of the camp's organizers was Valeriy Onatskiy, the head of the Department for Family and Children's Affairs of the occupation administration of Mariupol. A Schemes investigation in 2023 found that Onatskiy was involved in the relocation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to Russia -- activity that prompted the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin on suspicion of war crimes.

Occupation authorities said in November 2022 that branches of Yunarmia had also been established in the Russian-held parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions.

The head of Yunarmia in the Zaporizhzhya region is Fidail Bikbulatov, a Russian man whom Ukrainian intelligence has accused of involvement in the mass abduction, illegal deportation, and forced transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia.

In a comment to Schemes' media partners, Bikbulatov said Yunarmia sees "its members tying their lives to military service in the future."

"We see potential in them, we expect them to become military personnel," he said. "We train them, work with them, and want them to become military men -- the Defense Ministry even provides benefits for former Yunarmia members when they join -- but all this is done voluntarily."

Evidence indicates that Yunarmia's leadership judges the performance of its branches, at least in part, by the number of former members who join the Russian military.

In October, Yunarmia deputy chief Viktor Kaurov sent letters to regional branches about the mandatory annual "review competition" that said the evaluation would include two parameters: "the number of Yunarmia cadets called up for military service and enrolled in military universities" and "the number of Yunarmia cadets enrolled in military training centers."

Yunarmia's central headquarters in Moscow has not responded to requests for comment from Schemes.

Adapted from the original Ukrainian by Aleksander Palikot