As least 35,000 Ukrainian children are believed to be missing – abducted by Russian troops and forced into indoctrination programs since the start of the Kremlin’s brutal three-year invasion.
The children all had the misfortune to live behind what are now Russian lines — the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the southeast of Ukraine.
Some were orphans — abducted from care homes or from the battlefield after the death of their parents, Ukrainian authorities said.
Other parents were tricked into sending their children on school trips to Crimea, billed as a retreat to escape the fighting, only to never hear from them again, according to reports.
It’s believed the kids captured have been forced into “Russification” programs — kept in so-called “re-education camps,” according to the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
The US research team has been working to keep track of Ukrainian children that have disappeared since the start of Russia’s 2022 war on Kyiv and has identified dozens of these camps — at least 13 in Belarus and 43 in Russian-annexed Crimea and across mainland Russia.
There, the kids are being indoctrinated into Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s vision, raised to speak Russian — not Ukrainian — and forced to sing the Russian national anthem daily.
Some of the children forcibly removed from their homes were as young as four months, according to researchers.
Other kids have reportedly been sent to Kremlin-backed military boot camps, training to fight for Moscow in the brutal war against their own country.
Shocking images from Russian state television have shown young Ukrainian boys and girls assembling and firing assault rifles, all while the Russian flag and a portrait of the Russian tyrant loomed in the background.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has claimed to have abducted a staggering 700,000 Ukrainian children from the occupied territories.
Russians have been open about what they’ve called “rehoming” Ukrainian children, who have been portrayed as having been abandoned by their families.
Moscow’s state television has aired news segments where kids arriving from Ukraine are gifted teddy bears by their adopted Russian families.
Even the Kremlin’s Children’s Rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, has publicly bragged about adopting a boy from the city of Mariupol, which was seized by Russian forces in 2022 following a bloody, months-long siege.
Any attempts to recover the children has been met with stiff resistance from the Kremlin, which has even refused to give Ukrainian authorities a list of their names, according to the Yale team.
Only a few hundreds of those forcibly removed were able to escape or return home, with the help of Ukrainian organizations like Bring Kids Back.
