Camps for “ideological reeducation” of Ukrainian children created in Russia and Crimea
A network of camps for "reeducation" and adoption of Ukrainian children is operating in Russia and temporarily occupied Crimea.
Source: Conflict Observatory report from Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL)
Details: Authors of the investigation have stated that there is a network in Russia and temporarily occupied Crimea which spans at least 43 facilities identified by Yale HRL. Most of these facilities deal with "ideological reeducation" of the children from Ukraine who are from 4 months to 17 years old.
Yale HRL has collected information about at least 6,000 children from Ukraine who have been held at camps and other facilities since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The total number of children is not known and is likely significantly higher than 6,000.
Most of those camps are health facilities where children are supposedly taken for vacations. Russians use the rest of the camps to accommodate the children taken to Russia for reeducation or adoption.
The majority of these facilities are located in Crimea. However, 10 camps are not far from big Russian cities, like Moscow, Kazan and Yekaterinburg. Such camps also exist in Siberia and the Far East.
It is noted that the camps in Crimea and Chechnya teach Ukrainian children how to handle weapons and military equipment.
The investigators have established that a psychiatric clinic and orphanages are among those facilities where the Russians send Ukrainian children.
"The main goal of the camps is presumably political reeducation. They promote cultural, historical, societal, and patriotic messages or ideas that serve the political interests of Russia to Ukrainian children."
Most of the children in these camps are taken from Russia-occupied territories of Donbas, some of them from Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts before these territories were liberated by Ukraine.
It is noted that the Russians put parents under a lot of pressure in order to have them agree on sending children to the camps. Some of the parents have said that they did not agree to send their children to such facilities, but the children were sent anyway.
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