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To set the stage for this article it is important to first debunk a myth. Russia claims that the fact it has removed children from Ukraine is a humanitarian endeavour. In its telling, there is no denial of taking children from Ukraine to Russia. On the contrary, the Russians boast about it. The reason behind this, they say, is to take kids out of harm’s way. There’s a deadly war going on. They are saving those kids from getting hurt or killed, they claim. This is a lie.
The way that Russia wages war is that ▶it destroys from afar the next place it wants to conquer. It doesn’t have ground troops to swoop in and rescue children in these places, it is bombing these urban areas from the air and with drones and with artillery. “Rescuing” kids from danger, the danger Russian forces are responsible for creating, is a physical impossibility.
What Russia has done is to take children from the territories that it invaded in the early stages of the war, when by superior force it captured large cities virtually unscathed and then set about terrorising the local populations who lived there, including by abducting children and sending them to “education camps” in Russia or occupied Crimea.
In reality, these are concentration camps. For children. The echoes of the behaviour of Nazi Germany in WWII do not end there.
To understand the scale of this of not impossible, but it is imprecise. Because there is no access for human rights workers or reporters to the occupied areas. Some figures are available, though.
Ukraine has documented almost 20,000 cases. That means the children and their identities and backgrounds are known. At the same time, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights puts the real figure of somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 300,000. We do not even know, therefore, to the nearest hundred thousand, how many children Russia has actually taken from Ukraine.
We do know the number of children Russia itself boasts of. According to the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, 700,000 children have entered Russia from Ukraine since February 2022.
Ms Lvova-Belova is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, charged alongside President Putin at the same time, for war crimes. Specifically for the illegal deportation and transfer of children.
Ukraine’s efforts to get these abducted children returned to their families are painfully slow. One of the leading organisations engaged in this arduous task is called Save Ukraine, founded by Mykola Kuleba, which typically succeeds in repatriating between 15 – 30 children at any one time. These returns are sporadic and sometimes occur weekly, sometimes monthly. In all cases the Russian side obstructs the process. As a result, only about 2,300 children have been returned through their efforts.
In June of 2025, at a rare direct face-to-face dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian officials held in Istanbul, a list of 339 children was handed to the Russia side. These cases, fully documented and indisputable, were presented as a “confidence-building measure” to test Russian commitment to any kind of cooperation. None of these children have been returned to their home country.
One of the cruellest things that can be done to a child is to tell them that they have been abandoned. And yet that is what Russian authorities are directing the centres that hold these children, and the families that adopt them, to do. “Your parents don’t want you. They have given you up. This is your life now” is the message poured into thousands of young minds.
The network of “camps” (not holiday camps, but concentration camps) housing the children that have been taken out of Ukraine stretches across the 11 time zones of Russia, even placing children in the far east of the country making their reunification with loved ones far more difficult from every perspective. According to research undertaken by Yale University there are at least 210 such facilities.
The regime inside these places, where hundreds of children are housed at any one time, is as one would expect inside of a fascist country. These kids are exposed to indoctrination, euphemistically termed “patriotic education” to force them to abandon their actual identity and sense of being Ukrainian.
The aforementioned Maria Lvova-Belova – wanted war criminal – has herself “adopted” a child from Mariupol, a city left in ruins by the initial stage of the full-scale invasion, where tens of thousands of lives were lost.
Ms Lvova-Belova has spoken publicly about how she has treated the child, Pylyp, in order to combat his intense dislike of Russians and his passion for singing Ukrainian songs. Despite her claiming that his mindset was “rewritten” through “intense systemic integration”, that was insufficient to stop him from running away and trying to return to Ukraine through Belarus. He was captured by Russian secret services and has now been enrolled in a Moscow University where he is being prepared for work in the Russian Prosecutor’s Office.
As with all children in Russia, the Ukrainian children are being militarised too. The schools there have long had versions of programmes whereby children were brainwashed to idolise the military and sacrifices for “the motherland”. The current iteration is called the “Young Army”, a movement that replaced the previous “Nashi” (meaning “ours”) programme, which – only a single letter in difference [Note: in the Cyrillic alphabet] from the word “Nazi” – was not too dissimilar in methodology and ideology from the Hitlerjugend of the 1930s.
If you want to understand how Nazism was allowed to take root throughout a society, capturing the minds of the upcoming generation was instrumental. If you want to understand why the total Russian casualty figures (dead and seriously wounded) in Ukraine now stands at almost 1.5 million, the Young Army was established a decade ago, in 2016. “Nashi” was established over a decade earlier, in 2005. The kids who went through these programmes are now of military service age. The Ukrainians now being exposed to this will come of military age. They too, unless this war is stopped, will be forced or coerced into fighting their own country one day.
On top of the hundreds of thousands of children removed from Ukraine and moved to Russia, there are an estimated 1.6 million children living in occupied Ukrainian territories. They too are being forced to learn the Russian school curriculum and all that entails. The propaganda, the lessons in how to use a Kalashnikov automatic weapon, false history, and more.
The historical repetition and shared tactics between Nazi Germany and contemporary Russia are not the end of the story. When we refer to the Second World War, we often use the phrase “never again”.
When Germany invaded Poland, they took an estimated 200,000 Polish children with the intent to “Germanise” them. As Russia is doing with the “Russification” of Ukrainian children.
One of the tactics used by the Germans in Poland was to sweep many of these children up from orphanages. This tactic too copied by the Russians today.
According to the Warfare History Network, the goal of the Nazis after taking these children was to “erase any trace of their native heritage and reshape them as loyal Nazis.” This would involve prohibiting the use of their language, with solitary confinement or a beating as a penalty for non-compliance. The children were taught the language of their occupiers and captors. They were forced to adorn military uniforms and regalia, and to sing songs of loyalty to the army and the Reich. While we say never again, all of this is happening right now.
At the end of World War Two, only some 15% of those children were ever returned to their homes and families.
“Never again”?
Paul Niland is an Irish journalist based in Ukraine. He is the founder of the country’s national suicide prevention hotline, Lifeline Ukraine.
