Russia is forcing children abducted from Ukraine to fight against their own country when they turn 18

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Russia is forcing children abducted from Ukraine to fight against their own country when they turn 18, Ukrainian officials have told The Times.

An estimated 35,000 children have been taken from Ukraine’s eastern occupied territories so far since 2014, including at gunpoint.

New evidence is now emerging that when the children turn 18, they are being conscripted into Russian battalions and sent to the front line, to potentially face their friends, fathers or brothers on the battlefield.

It is not known how many have been conscripted, but by some estimates there are thousands.

In interviews with The Times, Ukrainian government officials allege that forcing the teenagers to fight serves two purposes for the Kremlin: the first is they present a solution to Russia’s military manpower crisis, with the country having suffered one million casualties already in the war so far.

The second is as a brutal new form of psychological warfare against the Ukrainian people, allegedly the result of the Russian president’s personal orders.

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Andriy Yermak, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, told The Times’s [...] podcast that the Ukrainian government has obtained hard evidence of the practice, such as conscription documents.

The teenagers’ bodies are also now being found on the battlefield. “We have found facts about this, yes,” Yermak told this week’s episode of the podcast.

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Yale university’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the leading global authority on Russia’s child abduction program, is also investigating a mass of specific allegations concerning former children forced into combat.

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Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director [Yale university’s Humanitarian Research Lab], told The Times that while his team must “deal in facts that we’re able to testify about in court”, they were “working on being able to present documentary evidence on this right now”. He said he suspected the allegations were true.

Raymond said: “Anecdotally, the conscription-to-combat pipeline is everywhere. We have heard it an awful lot.

“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.”

Ukrainian children began to be abducted in 2014 when Russian troops invaded the Donbas and Crimea regions, initially from orphanages but then directly from their parents. Advertisement

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The program [that sends Ukrainian children to the battlefield] is overseen by the FSB, Russia’s state security service, in a sign of the importance Ukrainian officials say that Putin attaches to it.

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The podcast also spoke to [Ukrainian teenager] Vlad Rudenko [who] was eventually rescued from it by his mother last year and smuggled back over the front line:

“We were made to sing the Russian anthem every morning, then physical training — jumps, squats, running, crawling — and we also learnt how to shoot,” Rudenko said.

“The 16 and 17 year-olds were given dummy rifles and the older ones used live ammunition.

“The more it went on, the more worried I got that we were going to be sent to fight.

“The Russians didn’t manage to take anything from me though, they just deprived me of my childhood.

“I am lucky, because there are Ukrainians now who are fighting against their own people.”

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Raymond, a lecturer in global affairs, added: “I’m not sure Europeans and Americans understand the true nature of what’s going on here. This is a systematic, industrialised network of child trafficking, a revival of Stalin’s pioneer programme.

“It is likely to be the largest child abduction in war since World War Two, comparable to the Germanification of Polish children by the Nazis.”

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