Kidnapped Ukrainian Children Are ‘Brainwashed’ by Wagner Mercenaries in Russia

Russia continues to brainwash Ukrainian children abducted from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Once in Russia, militants of the Wagner terrorist organization conduct propaganda lectures in camps where the Ukrainian children are held.

According to the Center for National Resistance (CNR), Russians are holding “dialogues with heroes” in which terrorists popularize Russia’s war against their homeland. There was a case when a drug dealer from the disbanded Wagner PMC (private military corporation) gave a lecture.

“In 2021, the lecturer, whom the occupiers show as an example to Ukrainian children, was sentenced to eight years and two months in a strict-regime penal colony for illegal drug trafficking on a particularly large scale,” the CNS said.

In 2022, the man was recruited by the Wagner PMC and went to Ukraine. After six months, the contract ended, and now he is giving “lessons of courage” to the children taken from Ukraine.

In early October, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, reported that there are at least 70 camps throughout the temporarily occupied territories and Russia, where Russians are forcibly “re-educating” abducted Ukrainian children to deprive them of their national identity.

According to Lubinets, this “training” is compulsory, so Ukrainian children have no choice but to participate or not. This is the official curriculum in the Russian Federation for Ukrainian children.

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“The Russians are doing this not just deliberately, they want to raise a new generation of Russian military personnel from among Ukrainian children, who in the future, according to the Russians, will probably have to fight against Ukraine or other states again,” Lubinets said.

Thousands of children are “trained” in such camps during just one shift. Not only boys, but also girls take part in this training program, where they are taught how to disassemble a Kalashnikov rifle, sing Russian songs and prepare for a military career. Russian propagandists tell children that Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation have never existed.

“Russians deliberately commit actions aimed at forcibly moving children from one ethnic group to another. This is one of the signs of genocide as a war crime,” Lubinets said.

In total, it is now known that since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military has killed 512 Ukrainian children and injured another 1,158. Torture was used against 75 children, and the prosecutor’s office recorded 13 cases of sexual violence against minors.

The ombudsman also pointed out that Russians have deported a total of about 20,000 children to their territory.

The Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights assured that all state efforts are aimed at ensuring that Russians start returning Ukrainian children en masse. In addition, there are already new mechanisms for searching for children in Russia.