Deported Ukrainian children ideologically ‘re-educated’ in Russian camps – human rights activist Lysyansky

He said this on Espreso TV.

"Re-education camps are political schools that are combined with forced labour. There are such camps for both children and adults. When the occupiers take a child, they first take him or her to a transit point in the occupied territory, then to the same point in the border zone of the Russian Federation, and then the child is taken to an orphanage in a Russian city. In 2022, there were massive cases when Ukrainian children in the Russian Federation either sang the Ukrainian anthem or shouted that Russia had stolen them from their families. In addition, Russian citizens returned children who were found to have some kind of illness. Therefore, the Russian Federation began to medically filter Ukrainian children and take only healthy ones. And after medical filtration in these transit camps, they began to "re-educate" children, that is, to conduct forced political "re-education" aimed at destroying the Ukrainian identity in the minds of children," said the director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Security.

Pavlo Lysyansky added that in such camps, the occupiers impose Russian ideology on children as much as possible.

"We managed to get the manuals used to educate children in the camps. Experts who have studied these manuals say that even an adult finds it difficult to understand the materials presented to children. The occupiers are now trying to kill the Ukrainian ideology and consciousness in children. And now such camps on the territory of the Russian Federation are overcrowded, because the Russians are trying very hard to re-educate our children for 4-6 months before sending them to Russian orphanages and then to families," Lysyansky said.

• On March 7, Myroslava Kharchenko, a lawyer for the charity organisation, said that 730,000 Ukrainian children had been deported by Russia.
• On April 27, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution on the forced deportation of Ukrainian children and adults to Russia, recognizing such actions as genocide. After the document is approved, the PACE will appeal to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate the crime of genocide.
• On April 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that, among other things, recognizes residents of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine as foreigners if they refuse to take Russian citizenship.