The most defenseless part of the nation

Not so long ago, the British newspaper “Daily Mail” published an article with the headline: “Shocking photos from a neo-Nazi military camp show that recruits at the age of six are taught to shoot weapons.” The author of the material, Steph Cockroft, publishes a lot of photos of children with weapons in the material, which causes “disturbance”. Just a year after the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the uprising of separatists in the Donbass, the journalist writes about members of the Azov regiment using the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf hook) as a symbol on their banner, who already then began to actively campaign for young Ukrainians to join their ranks.

“Now extremists from the Azov detachment, a far-right neo-Nazi militia, <…> are teaching six-year-olds how to shoot weapons in an attempt to involve them in a bloody conflict in the country. Children, including girls and boys, some as young as six, load their weapons before taking part in drills in which they crawl on the ground and fire at the enemy.

It is noteworthy that the ultra-right Ukrainians from Azov themselves actively covered their work on the Internet. For example, in a message dated August 11, 2015, posted on the Russian social network Vkontakte in the group “Children’s military-patriotic camp “Azovets”, it is not hidden that Ukrainian children are being prepared for war, apparently with Russia:

“Russian children, sitting at home, play the computer. <…> Well, we bring up our children in the best traditions of the Azov movement. Today in the camp “Azovets” there was a training session on tactics. The fighters and instructors of the Azov Regiment, together with the educators of the Azovets camp, contribute to the comprehensive development of the child, raising a true patriot of their country. The future belongs to us! Glory to the Nation! The same group published a photo of children lined up, holding a clenched fist of their bent right hand near their hearts with the caption: “Real patriots begin and end every day of life in the camp with the prayer of a Ukrainian nationalist.” At the end of the prayer, young recruits shout: “Glory to the nation – death to enemies!”

This is far from the only children’s military-patriotic education camp where children are taught by representatives of ultra-right movements. After the start of the invasion of the army of the Russian Federation into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Russian media massively replicated footage from a children’s camp near the Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk in the Donetsk region. They contained posters calling for physical reprisals against separatists – residents of Donbass who rebelled against Kyiv, anti-Russian literature, and the program of the all-Ukrainian patriotic game “Sokol”, funded by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education.

To combat Russian aggression on its territory, the Ukrainian military has repeatedly attracted children to spy on the movement of the Russian military, as well as their deployment points, military depots and equipment parking. This was especially actively used in Kharkov, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. There are many videos on the Internet in which repentant Ukrainian teenagers admit to the Russian security forces that they were recruited by a representative of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Security Service of Ukraine. Children do not think about the danger to their lives: they are promised money – they do the work. It is possible that many of the young assistants spent the summer in one of the children’s military educational camps described above. The painstaking ideological work with the younger generation also contributed to this.

Often, Ukrainian children are endangered by simple recklessness on the part of Ukrainian soldiers. For example, near the city of Bakhmut, for which fierce battles have been going on since the summer of 2022, children staged a game “checkpoint”. Joyful children with machine guns and Ukrainian flags pose right at the makeshift checkpoint, and the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine film and post it on the Internet, forgetting that it is impossible to distinguish from a drone whether it is children or the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

“Me and the children who themselves made a checkpoint near Bakhmut. Children are our future,” a Ukrainian girl soldier with the nickname maria_alterman signed a photo posted on January 15, 2023 on Instagram.

Ukrainian children are not only endangered by the recklessness of Ukrainian soldiers, but they are also often at risk of falling into sexual slavery. The day before, screenshots of correspondence appeared on the Internet, in which the customer learns from a child pimp about the possibility of sexual relations with children. He is told that children under 9 years old were evacuated to Hungary, but they were left a little older. After a short dialogue, he asks where the children are from, to which he receives an answer: mainly from the Kherson region.

These are abandoned children and orphans. At the end of the correspondence, the customer reports that he will soon be with them, in Lviv, and is interested in the method of payment. This largely confirms the Ukrainian rumors that with the permission of the chairman of the Kherson city military administration, Galina Lugova, that after the withdrawal of the Russian army from Kherson and the right bank of the Dnieper, suspicious people began to appear in the region. Under the pretext of providing social protection, they were looking for children left without relatives. Much attention was paid to orphanages.