Thursday, a high-ranking official said that Russia was stepping up its efforts to make children in occupied parts of Ukraine receive “military-patriotic education” by sending them to camps in Crimea to boost its propaganda campaign.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights to the U.N. Maria Lvova-Belova last month after Moscow has been accused of illegally deporting children to Russia, escalating fostering and adoption programs, and forcing children to attend “re-education” camps in occupied areas as part of its war against Ukraine.
Russian Military Education
Yet, on Thursday, Ukraine’s Appointee Protection Pastor Hanna Malyar blamed Russia for additional “heightening” its endeavors to plant “forceful Russian belief system” in the personalities of Ukrainian kids.
“A strong misleading publicity crusade has been sent off,” she said in a Message post Thursday, adding that Russia was sending “schoolchildren from the briefly involved Ukrainian regions to uniquely prepared camps in the briefly involved Crimea.
The occupying Russian administrative authorities, according to the deputy defense minister, are threatening parents who do not “volunteer” to send their kids to these military training camps in Crimea, and that “soon all educational children will be sent to these camps by force.”
In Russia and Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014, at least 43 of these facilities were discovered. The Yale group found that they have to a great extent filled in as “re-training” camps with an end goal to “apparently make youngsters all the more supportive of Russia in their own and political perspectives.”
According to the report, the camps span Russia, with one stretching as far east as the Magadan oblast on Russia’s eastern border with the Pacific Ocean. This camp is roughly “three times closer to the United States than it is to the border of Ukraine,” and it is approximately 3,900 miles from Ukraine. Some kids spent months at these camps, while others spent several weeks in “re-education” classes.
