WASHINGTON – Russia is holding tens of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children in a sprawling, "potentially unprecedented" network of more than 200 militarization and "brainwashing" camps, according to a Sept. 16 report from a group of war crime investigators.

"What we’re seeing is an industrialized network of re-education, aka brainwashing to turn Ukrainian children into Russians and, in some cases, to turn certain Ukrainian children into soldiers," said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab, the group behind the report.

Russia's forcible transfer and reeducation of Ukrainian children, and in some cases militarization of them, is occurring at a much larger scale than was previously known, the lab's investigators found. They tracked the children to 210 sites, including summer camps, sanatoriums and military bases inside of Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories.

The youngest Ukrainian children, as young as 4 months old, are held in facilities with names like "forest fairy camp" and "teddy bear camp" where they are taught propagandistic retellings of the Russia-Ukraine war and forced to learn Russian folk songs and fairy tales, Raymond said.

At age 8 and up, they are forced into "cadet schools" and begin receiving junior ROTC-type training and as teenagers, they receive active military and combat training, the researcher said.

At all ages, the children are forbidden from speaking Ukrainian, he said.

Russia kidnaps Ukrainian kids at historic scale

The exact number of Ukrainian children who have been abducted by Russia since it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 is unknown. Ukraine's government estimates it at nearly 20,000 children, while past reports from the Yale lab have placed it at more than 35,000.

Raymond said the massive Russian operation is rivaled historically only during Nazi Germany and the Soviet Stalin regime. Many Ukrainian children are being held in the same locations – and, in at least one case, the exact same facility – where people abducted from the Baltic states during the Soviet-era "Operation Tidal Wave" in 1949 were also imprisoned, he added.

According to the report, military training was observed at approximately 40 of the locations and the programs included combat training and drone assembly.

While the researchers don’t yet have evidence in hand that Ukrainian children are forced to fight for Russia in the war, Raymond said the lab made an important breakthrough in that direction when it identified a trench carved in the shape of a "Z" at one child militarization camp. "Z trenches," Raymond said, have been used more and more by both sides in the conflict because they guard against blasts from FPV, or first person view, drones.

"Can we confirm that there is a training pipeline at an industrial scale to prepare them for combat operations? Yes, we can," Raymond said.

The lab found that half of the locations they identified are managed by the Russian government. The other half are run by unknown or private operators, but "the true number of facilities affiliated with the government is likely higher," according to the report.

While some children were held at camps and returned home, others were kept indefinitely, the report says, and placed with Russian families who formally adopted them.

The lab sifted through publicly available data and commercially available satellite images to track the facilities.

The "breakthrough" in the investigation, according to Raymond – selfies that local Russian officials snapped with abducted Ukrainian children and posted online. Researchers extracted location data from the photos to track the kids through satellites and reconnaissance.

Ukrainian officials said the report provides irrefutable evidence that Russia is systemically deporting, illegally adopting, reeducating and militarizing children.

"It’s now clear Russia plans to use Ukraine’s own children as a 'weapon' against us and Europe more broadly," Andriy Yermak, who heads the office of president in Ukraine, said in a statement.

Yale's researchers said they shared the data with the U.N. Security Council, which Russia sits on. The lab has shared past data with the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, a Russian official responsible for children's rights.

Russia denies that it is committing war crimes. Without mentioning Ukraine directly, first lady Melania Trump brought up the plight of children in an appeal to Putin in a letter her husband delivered to the Russian leader in August during their Alaskan summit. Ukraine has said the return of children must be part of any deal to end the war.

Yale lab grappled with Trump funding cut-off

The research group had received funding through U.S. State Department program until the Trump administration shut it off earlier in 2025, along with other programs it said were wasteful or did not align with American interests.

After outraged lawmakers warned the satellite imagery and biometric data used to track stolen children could be lost as a result, the State Department temporarily restored funds to allow for the information to be transferred. Ukrainian authorities hope to use archived data to bring children home and prosecute Russian officials responsible for the unlawful adoptions.

Raymond said the lab had an uphill battle to continue its investigations after the funding spigot shut off. Then, rescue came – in the form of "Ukrainian-American grandmothers."

"I have these incredible messages of $5, $10, $25 donations saying, 'I don’t have much. I’m on fixed income, but you’re looking for the kids, so keep going,'" Raymond said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Russia is running a sprawling network of 'brainwashing' camps for Ukrainian kids: Report

Reporting by Cybele Mayes-Osterman and Francesca Chambers, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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