You're reading: German TV report: Russian separatists use child soldiers in front-line combat

Russian-separatist forces have been using children as young as 14 as front-line troops in their war against Ukraine in the Donbas – a war crime, German television reported on Nov. 10.


Reporters from the German channel ZDF’s Frontal21 news
magazine said they had spoken to several child soldiers at a cadet school near
Luhansk. One of the children, 16-year-old Bogdan Kravchenko, told them that he
had been fighting for two years and had killed Ukrainian soldiers.

I only killed
fascists, not people. There are no people among the fascists,” Kravchenko told
the German reporters, according to a press release from ZDF.

The United Nations defines a person as a child soldier
if they are below the age of 18 and have been recruited “by an armed force or
armed group in any capacity.”

Other children that Frontal21 spoke to described the
mental trauma they had suffered due to the war. One, 16-year-old Yevgeny
Shakunov, is seen in a photo shown during the report posing next to a dead
Ukrainian soldier, cradling an assault rifle in his arms.

Another child soldier tracked down by Frontal21,
16-year-old Semyon Spektor, said he was in mourning for his girlfriend,
Alexandra Kaplina, who was killed in action fighting for the
Russian-separatists when she was only 15.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, it is
a war crime to
“conscript
or enlist children under the age of fifteen years into armed forces or groups,
or use them to participate actively in hostilities.”

Reports of children taking
up arms in eastern Ukraine have been circulating almost since the conflict
broke out there in April 2014. In May 2015, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Ukraine, which is tasked with overseeing the ceasefire in the
warzone, reported observing a 12- to 14-year-old child wearing camouflage and
carrying an AK-47 assault rifle at a checkpoint in Makiyivka, a
separatist-controlled town in Ukraine.

The BBC in November 2014
reported that Ukrainian television’s 5 Kanal had interviewed a 17-year-old
child who had worked as a sapper for the Ukrainian military for two months
before being wounded and hospitalized.

There have also been
reports, widely circulated in the international media, that the Azov Battalion,
a former volunteer unit that has been incorporated into the Ukrainian armed
forces, has run children’s summer camps that feature weapons training and
nationalist indoctrination.

Some Azov Battalion
members have been linked to far-right groups, and the symbols used in the
battalion’s badges and flags are similar to ones used by the Nazis.

However, there have not
been any confirmed reports of child soldiers being involved in combat on the
Ukrainian government side.

Kyiv Post editor Euan MacDonald can be reached at
[email protected]