Putin's Ukrainian Child Soldiers

Moscow is increasingly pushing abducted Ukrainian children into frontline service--against their homes and their countrymen.

According to a Georgetown University research report, Russian authorities are placing more and more Ukrainian minors abducted from occupied areas into "reeducation camps" and military training, thereafter dispatching at least some into combat. The potential numbers of such conscripts are staggering. "While Ukraine has officially identified 19,546 cases of forcible deportations, Ukraine’s 5 AM Coalition estimates the true number could range from 260,000 to 700,000. ... By 2021, 29,000 children in Russian-occupied Crimea and 7,500 in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions had already been recruited."

Russia's Ukrainian child soldiers are being drawn into a growing and diverse bureaucracy that Moscow has established to feed its wartime campaign. Most notable of these is the

Yunarmiya (“Youth Army”) established by the Russian Defense Ministry in 2016.

In an interview with The Times, Ukrainian officials have described Russia's tactic as doubly insidious, serving both as a remedy for Moscow's military manpower problems and as a form of psychological warfare against Kyiv's defending forces. And as Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab notes, “We know older kids are being put into cadet schools, given combat weapons training and combat vehicle training. “Why would they be put into this training pipeline? There can be only one good reason for it, and it’s not for parades.”