Ukrainian children have been taken to over 200 different facilities across Russia, including locations where they have been subjected to forced “re-education” and military training in a clear violation of international law, according to new research.
Eight different types of facilities, ranging from summer camps to religious sites to military academies stretching across the entire expanse of Russia, have been identified in the report from the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab published Tuesday.
The study was initiated at Ukraine’s request to better understand the full size of the network of facilities where children are held, to help them eventually return to their homeland, Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the research lab, said in a telephone interview Sunday.
“It’s really important that all the people involved in different ways to bring the kids back have the most accurate geospatial information possible, and this is it,” he said.
Using open-source intelligence, news reports and Russian government documents, as well as satellite imagery, the Yale report identified 210 different locations where children are taken. Some are brought to locations temporarily, while others are given Russian citizenship and coerced into forced adoption, the report says.
At most sites, children go through “re-education” programs to enforce Russian patriotism, including lectures in Russian history and singing the national anthem, it adds.
Others, particularly older children, have received military training at cadet academies and a military base, including “drone control and tactics training,” and have participated in shooting and grenade-throwing competitions, according to the report.
The researchers said they cannot verify if any of the children given military training were ever conscripted into the Russian military or were otherwise deployed in the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, and the country’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Ukraine’s official “Bring Kids Back” program, which partners the government with other countries and international organizations to return kids from Russia, has recorded nearly 20,000 cases of unlawful deportations and forced transfers of children.
The new report does not estimate the number of children who have been held either temporarily or indefinitely in Russia. But Raymond said identifying the locations gives a better sense of the scale, comparing it to the carnival game of trying to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar.
“Right now, with this report, we volumetrically know as much as we’re probably going to know how big the jar is, and the jar is gigantic,” he said.
The report builds on research that has helped support allegations of war crimes against Russian President Vladimir Putin issued by the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant accusing him of overseeing the forced abductions and deportations. The ICC has also accused Lvova-Belova of committing similar crimes.
The Kremlin has previously denied the allegations and said the warrants were “outrageous.”
Ukraine has made the return of abducted children central to any talks with Russia to end the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy raised the issue with President Donald Trump during a meeting at the White House last month, days after Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska.
Last week, Zelenskyy announced plans to hold a “high-level event” on abducted children during the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly later this month.
The research was hampered after State Department funding for the Conflict Observatory program, which Yale was part of, was cut by executive order by Trump. It has not been restored. All of the data would have been lost, but a contractor working on the project in Florida protectively kept a backup, according to Raymond.
The lab’s repository of data has been transferred to Europol, a European law enforcement agency.
The researchers have also stopped directly sharing their findings with the ICC after the Trump administration-imposed sanctions on the court in February.
Previously, Raymond said, the lab had cooperated with the ICC on investigations of allegations of war crimes committed in Ukraine on the basis of an agreement put in place during the Biden administration.
Now, he said, researchers are operating under the assumption that the previous agreement is no longer valid. “We no longer believe that it is safe for us to attempt to share information with them, given the lack of clarity legally from the Trump administration,” he said.
However, a new bipartisan push in the Senate is underway to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism unless it returns Ukrainian children taken during the war. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Katie Britt, R-Ala., introduced a bill last week threatening to add both Russia and Belarus to the list, which currently includes only Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria.
