Introduction
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied territories has evolved into a systematic component of Russia’s governance practices there. This paper asks why the Russian state has sustained large-scale child transfers from occupied territories despite their political, logistical, and legal costs, and how these practices illuminate broader logics of authority and governance under occupation. We argue that the removal of children serves several interrelated functions – exerting coercive pressure on local populations, facilitating ideological reorientation, and contributing to demographic restructuring – whose cumulative impact extends beyond isolated violations or opportunistic wartime abuses. By focusing on children, who are among the most institutionally dependent and socially malleable groups, Russian authorities employ a form of control that simultaneously influences civilian behaviour, disrupts Ukrainian identity transmission, and shapes future demographic and political outcomes in line with the state’s objectives. The article’s contribution lies in conceptualising these practices as a form of politicised captivity: the state-directed, long-term custodial control of a population segment for political ends, embedded within the broader repertoire of occupation and repression.
Early cases anticipated the current scale. In mid-2014, Russian-backed forces abducted a group of twenty-five Ukrainian orphans from Donetsk oblast and transferred them to Russia. Around the same period in occupied Crimea, Russian authorities launched the ‘Train of Hope’ programme encouraging Russian families to adopt Ukrainian orphans – effectively formalising their transfer and integration into Russian institutional settings.Footnote 1 Dozens of children were relocated under this initiative, with official records adjusted to obscure their origins. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these previously localised or ad hoc practices evolved into a more formalised and systematic approach to the forcible transfer of children. By late 2024, Ukrainian state sources had recorded 19,546 children as forcibly transferred or displaced to Russia or Russian-controlled territory.Footnote 2 Many were separated from parents or guardians during evacuations or ‘filtration’ procedures,Footnote 3 and hundreds have reportedly been adopted into Russian families, complicating prospects for repatriation.Footnote 4 The magnitude of these actions prompted the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March 2023 to issue arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova on charges of unlawful deportation and transfer of children, classified as war crimes.Footnote 5
The article proceeds as follows. First, we outline the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s theorisation of the state of exception, and clarify how we employ the notion of politicised captivity.Footnote 6 We then provide a historical overview of child transfers from 2014 onward, including the categories of children targeted and the legal-institutional mechanisms facilitating these processes. Next, we present empirical findings derived from witness testimonies and interviews, organised into key themes: forced displacement, psychological harm, disruption of education, ideological socialisation, exposure to violence, and adoption practices. In the analysis section, we apply our theoretical framework to interpret how these practices function as biopolitical control, operate within a sovereign state of exception, manifest forms of necropolitical power, and advance broader imperial ambitions through coercive means. The conclusion summarises the argument, discusses wider implications for scholarship and policy, and identifies directions for further research on this emergent modality of state-directed captivity.
Literature review
Following the escalation of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, scholarly analysis of the deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories has expanded considerably. Academic engagement with this issue now converges around three principal strands of theorisation.
The first interprets these deportations as violations of international humanitarian and criminal law, primarily examining their qualification under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Article II(e) of the Genocide Convention. Legal scholarsFootnote 7 argue that the deportations meet the legal threshold of genocidal conduct, emphasising the intent to destroy the Ukrainian national group in the Russian-controlled territories through the forcible transfer of children.
A second strand extends the analysis beyond formal legal interpretation, situating child transfers within broader discussions of genocide, cultural erasure, and demographic engineering. Drawing on comparative scholarship on colonial and assimilationist child removal, authorsFootnote 8 argue that Russia’s systematic re-education, adoption, and naturalisation of Ukrainian minors constitute a deliberate attempt to dissolve Ukrainian cultural continuity. Within this framework, the transfer of children is not viewed as an incidental wartime abuse but as a sustained effort to reshape identity and loyalty within occupied populations.
The third body of scholarship situates child transfers within broader studies of imperialism and postcolonial governance. AuthorsFootnote 9 conceptualise these practices primarily as expressions of the ideological underpinnings of Russian aggression, examining how narratives of historical entitlement, civilisational mission, denial of Ukrainian statehood, and others shape Moscow’s expansionist policies. Within this literature, the deportation of children is interpreted less as a distinct governance mechanism than as illustrative evidence of Russia’s neo-imperial worldview and its drive to subordinate Ukraine politically, culturally, and demographically.
While these studies illuminate the normative and ideological dimensions of child deportations, they tend to conceptualise the practice primarily as a manifestation of destruction – legal, cultural, or imperial. What remains underexplored is how this destructive process simultaneously constitutes a mode of governance: a mechanism through which occupation is sustained, authority is embedded, and populations are reordered under Russian control. Specifically, the rationale behind sustaining a resource-intensive and politically costly policy suggests a deeper logic of governance – one in which child transfer facilitates not only coercive control but the reconstitution of administrative authority and population management under occupation. Future research must therefore move beyond documenting violations to analysing how such practices consolidate state power and legitimacy within the machinery of occupation.
Theoretical framework
This study employs a multilayered theoretical framework combining Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Agamben’s theorisation of the state of exception, and Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics to analyse the governance logics underpinning the transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories. This integrated framework allows us to situate child transfers within broader debates in international security concerning technologies of population management, the juridical reconfiguration of occupied space, and the sovereign production of vulnerability.
Foucault defines biopolitics as a form of modern power that takes biological life as its primary object of governance, operating across two interlinked dimensions: the disciplinary regulation of individual bodies (‘anatomo-politics’) and the management of population-level processes (‘biopolitics of the population’). Through this dual structure, power intervenes into the life cycle itself – organising reproduction, health, mortality, childhood formation, education, and generational renewal – not primarily through juridical prohibition but via continuous administrative, medical, pedagogical, and demographic regulation aimed at optimising the vitality, productivity, and governability of the population.Footnote 10
Against this theoretical backdrop, the practices examined here – relocation of minors, the imposition of Russian citizenship, and the integration of children into Russian educational and custodial institutions – constitute coercive interventions into the formation of future political subjects. Through these mechanisms, occupation authorities pursue the gradual restructuring of local populations, deter adult resistance by sustaining the persistent threat of family separation, and shape minors’ political socialisation via a comprehensive system of ideological conditioning embedded in both formal schooling and extracurricular programming.
Critical security scholarship offers a powerful set of conceptual tools for analysing how child deportation governs life, law, and vulnerability in contested territories. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics has been used extensively in international relations to analyse how modern states regulate populations through control over reproduction, socialisation, and identity formation.Footnote 11 In conflict settings, this scholarship highlights the use of education systems, civil registries, and welfare infrastructures as instruments for producing loyal subjects and managing political risk. Biopolitics thus helps illuminate how occupation authorities seek to recalibrate the demographic and cultural trajectories of the region by shaping identity and loyalty across generations.Footnote 12
Agamben’s theorisation of the ‘state of exception’ – which he characterises as the suspension of the juridical order under conditions of necessity, producing a legal zone in which law remains formally in force yet is not applied and thereby reducing individuals to ‘bare life’ outside the normal protection of rightsFootnote 13 – provides a complementary account of how such interventions become operationally possible by offering a lens for understanding the legal environment of occupied territories.
In occupied Ukrainian territories, the simultaneous suspension of Ukrainian legal authority and selective non-compliance with international humanitarian law have produced a juridical environment in which extraordinary measures can be enacted with reduced contestation. Within this framework, transferred children occupy a position akin to homo sacer, existing in a space where conventional legal protections are weakened. The state of exception clarifies how a series of measures – relocations, guardianship changes, adoptions – are rendered administratively permissible within an altered legal order.Footnote 14
Scholars applying this framework to border zones, emergency decrees, and wartime governance show how states suspend legal protections to create spaces in which individuals are rendered administratively pliable.⁸ Such analyses are particularly relevant to Russian-occupied Ukraine, where domestic decrees and emergency legislation enable guardianship reassignments, adoptions, and citizenship changes that contravene international norms while appearing ‘legal’ within Russia’s exceptional juridical order.
By integrating these two perspectives, we conceptualise child transfers as a form of politicised captivity. Unlike conventional detention, politicised captivity refers to the custodial control of a civilian population segment for explicitly political purposes – here, the reconfiguration of identity and the exertion of pressure on occupied communities.Footnote 15 This notion draws on work in international security that examines how states govern populations under occupation through spatial, legal, and familial interventions. In this case, children are separated from their communities and placed under sustained state supervision across a range of institutional settings, including boarding facilities, camps, and foster homes, with implications for identity formation and for the broader governance of occupied populations.Footnote 16
Finally, we draw on Mbembe’s framework of necropolitics, the sovereign capacity to expose specific groups to death or heightened precarity, to capture the more coercive and potentially lethal dimensions of these practices. While the stated rationale for relocation often invokes protection or humanitarian assistance, the placement of older children in militarised educational institutions and pathways into military service introduces forms of exposure that extend beyond biopolitical regulation. Necropolitics therefore highlights the spectrum of sovereign power, from the management of life to the organisation of risk and potential death, within which these practices operate.
In international security, necropolitical analyses highlight how states produce zones of abandonment or heightened precarity, exposing particular groups – often racialised or colonised – to premature death or militarised futures. This framework illuminates how the militarisation of camps for Ukrainian children, the placement of adolescents in cadet academies, and the severing of familial bonds constitute forms of exposure, risk, and ‘social death’.
While these theoretical traditions offer important insights, they have rarely been applied to children as political subjects, nor to the specific case of interstate occupation and cross-border child transfer. The present article brings these frameworks together to conceptualise deportation as a biopolitical, exceptional, and necropolitical technology of rule. The integration of biopolitics, exception, and necropolitics generates a framework that captures both the productive and repressive dimensions of Russian authority in occupied territories. It enables us to analyse child transfers as not isolated humanitarian violations but rather part of a broader repertoire of population governance in contested spaces, where the reordering of legal authority, family structures, and identity formation constitutes a central mechanism of control.Footnote 17
Data and sources
Our empirical analysis draws on original data collected during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The primary dataset was compiled by the Center for War Crimes Documentation, a Ukrainian NGO working in cooperation with the Office of the General Prosecutor and Polish partners.Footnote 18 It contains 178 detailed witness testimonies relating to war crimes, including child transfers, provided by survivors, relatives, and other eyewitnesses. Testimonies were collected under protocols designed to ensure legal admissibility, including informed consent and verification procedures.
Given the sensitivity of the topic and the strict conditions under which the Center records formal testimonies – only testimony from individuals who can personally qualify as witnesses in war crimes investigations and who consent to potential participation in legal proceedings was used. Many other affected residents share their experiences off record due to trauma, fear for relatives remaining in occupied areas, or other concerns. To address this structural limitation, we supplemented the dataset with four semi-structured interviews conducted in late 2023 with psychologists and lawyers on the Center’s field team. These interviews provided additional insight into patterns and community dynamics not consistently captured in formal testimonies. All data were anonymised, with pseudonyms or general descriptors used throughout. Explicit permission was obtained for all quotations.
To enhance reliability, we triangulated our primary data with a range of publicly accessible materials, including open-source reporting, statements by Ukrainian and international institutions, investigations by human rights organisations, and documentation by UN bodies. This triangulation enabled us to contextualise individual cases within broader patterns and verify key factual claims.
Analytic method
We employed qualitative thematic analysis to identify recurrent patterns in children’s experiences, following the applied thematic analysis framework outlined by Guest, MacQueen, and Namey.Footnote 19 The procedure involved close reading of all transcripts, inductive coding of segments relating to children, and the development of higher-order themes through iterative review. This process yielded six analytical categories:
1. Forced displacement of children
2. Psychological trauma and health challenges
3. Disruption of education
4. Exposure to violence
5. Ideological indoctrination and Russification
6. Forced adoption and 'integration; into Russia
Each theme is defined according to established qualitative research standards and illustrated with selected translated quotations. While individual accounts are foregrounded, the analysis emphasises broader patterns rather than detailed case narratives. Claims are anchored in either the primary dataset or corroborating external sources.
Through this integrated theoretical and methodological approach, the article proceeds to analyse the evolution, implementation, and effects of child transfer practices in occupied Ukrainian territories, demonstrating how they function within a wider assemblage of biopolitical regulation, exceptional governance, and politicised captivity.
Historical background: Child deportation as an occupation strategy
Russia’s removal of Ukrainian children has evolved over a decade, moving from isolated wartime irregularities to a routinised instrument of occupation governance. This trajectory reflects broader patterns associated with biopolitical regulation, exceptional legal orders, and state-managed captivity in contested territories. Situating these developments historically allows us to observe how institutional practices that were first trialled in Crimea and Donbas were later scaled, formalised, and justified through a parallel legal and administrative architecture. This background therefore provides an empirical foundation for understanding how transfers became embedded within Russia’s broader population-management strategy and how the exceptional legal environment of occupation enabled their expansion.
Documented instances of child transfers began shortly after Russia’s intervention in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. One of the first cases occurred in June 2014, when armed groups aligned with Russia intercepted an evacuation bus in Snizhne (Donetsk oblast) carrying twenty-five orphans and transported the children into Russia.Footnote 20 This episode illustrates the volatility of conflict and how the institutional fragmentation of early occupation created openings for the removal of minors. It also presents a cross-border custodial situation in which Ukrainian children were placed beyond Ukrainian state protection and within the administrative reach of Russian authorities.
A more structured initiative developed in Crimea, where Russian control was consolidated following the 2014 occupation by Russian military forces. There, authorities launched the Train of Hope programme, a scheme publicly framed as humanitarian adoption but operationalised as a mechanism for relocating Ukrainian orphans from Crimean institutions into Russian families.Footnote 21 Ukrainian investigations later verified at least thirty adoptions linked to this programme between 2014 and 2015, while the true figure is presumed to be higher.Footnote 22 Evidence that Russian officials altered children’s birth certificates, registration data, and place-of-origin markers during this period demonstrates how early on institutional tools were used to reclassify children legally and culturally – practices resonant with biopolitical identity formation and the juridical recalibration of status characteristic of exceptional governance.Footnote 23
From 2015 to 2021, smaller clusters of transfers continued in the occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.Footnote 24 These transfers were sporadic and, in some instances, reversible: occasional returns were negotiated through diplomatic channels or facilitated by international organisations. This period nevertheless served as a testing ground for administrative procedures and discursive justifications that would later underpin a more expansive policy. The limited scale likely reflected the provisional nature of local governance arrangements and the greater susceptibility to international scrutiny prior to 2022.
Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 marked an inflection point. As additional Ukrainian regions came under Russian military control, child transfers expanded dramatically in scale and geographic distribution.Footnote 25 Ukrainian authorities had confirmed the forced transfer of 19,393 children by the end of 2022, rising to 19,546 by late 2024 as further cases were documented. International organisations noted similar patterns, with the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry verifying 164 forced transfer cases by mid-2023.Footnote 26 The figure of approximately 19,500 confirmed cases thus represents the minimum number of individually identified children; unverified estimates, including those cited by Russian officials themselves, are considerably higher.Footnote 27
As noted above, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children in March 2023.Footnote 28 This decision was unprecedented in its focus on child transfer as a basis for international criminal prosecution and signals the extent to which the practice had evolved into a systematic component of the governing apparatus in the occupied territories.
Mechanisms of transfer: Operational pathways and administrative logics
Transfers of institutionalised and unaccompanied children
A primary transfer pathway involved children already separated from parental care – those residing in orphanages, boarding schools, or state-run institutions. Prior to the onset of full hostilities in February 2022, authorities in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk began relocating institutionalised children to Russia under the rationale of ‘protection from hostilities’.Footnote 29 Approximately 500 children were relocated through these mechanisms in early 2022.Footnote 30 As Russian forces advanced into southern and eastern regions, these practices scaled rapidly. Following the fall of Mariupol, for example, children from local institutions were promptly evacuated to Russia or Crimea.
The lack of formal bilateral mechanisms for guardianship information exchange between Ukraine and Russia precludes verification of children’s pre-conflict family ties or existing caregivers, making reunification efforts challenging. Even when relatives exist, practical barriers – such as the financial costs of retrieval, the security risks of travelling to Russia or occupied territories, or the potential loss of temporary protection status abroad – often prevent them from assuming guardianship.Footnote 31 This pattern illustrates how institutional categories, such as ‘orphans’ or ‘children without guardians’, became administratively legible populations through which occupation authorities could exercise biopolitical control, consistent with techniques of governing vulnerable groups under exceptional conditions.
‘Recreation’, ‘holiday’, and ‘respite’ programmes
A second mechanism involved recreational or educational programmes promoted as opportunities for temporary respite. In 2022, many families in newly occupied areas, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and parts of Kharkiv regions, consented to sending children to summer camps or holiday programmes, often motivated by fears for safety amid active combat or by financial hardship, as many low-income families could not afford recreational programmes for their children.Footnote 32 Moreover, multiple documented cases show that parents consented only to recreational or rehabilitational activities and were not informed of any educational or politicised components; these will be discussed in greater detail in the subsequent section.Footnote 33
However, in numerous cases children were not returned on the scheduled dates. Parents’ attempts to retrieve them were met with delays, bureaucratic obstacles, or outright refusal. Testimony from families in Kherson region indicates that what began as a two-week holiday could extend indefinitely, with some parents undertaking private efforts to recover their children across Russian-controlled territory.Footnote 34 These programmes blurred the boundary between voluntary participation and coercion.Footnote 35 They illustrate a governance mechanism in which parental consent was secured under conditions of constrained choice and/or deceit, thereby producing a form of politicised captivity disguised as civilian welfare initiatives.
Filtration, screening, and evacuation processes
A third transfer pathway arose during filtration procedures and evacuations. Filtration refers to screening operations carried out by Russian military forces as civilians attempted to leave Russian-controlled Ukrainian territories for either Ukrainian-controlled areas or for Russia. These operations involve interrogations, body and phone searches, biometric checks, and other intrusive measures.Footnote 36 Filtration often produced scenarios in which adults were detained or separated from their children.Footnote 37 In Mariupol in early 2022, several families experienced enforced separation during filtration, with detained adults transported to detention sites while children were transferred to camps or boarding institutions in Russia.Footnote 38
These processes amounted to positionally embedded opportunities for child transfer, produced by the administrative and coercive apparatus of occupation. Filtration checkpoints thus became sites where legal protections were circumvented and children’s guardianship was redefined, highlighting how exceptional security practices intersect with population sorting in wartime governance.
Belarusian participation
Belarus has played a role in receiving children from occupied Ukrainian territories under cooperation agreements with Russia. By late 2023, at least 2,219 Ukrainian children had been transferred to Belarusian facilities for ‘rehabilitation’.Footnote 39 Some children remained in Belarus for extended periods and were enrolled in local Russian-language schools, suggesting a degree of integration beyond temporary stays. Belarus’s involvement broadens the geographical scope of these transfers and demonstrates the cross-border institutionalisation of exceptional custodial arrangements.
Custodial settings and the reconfiguration of identity
Transferred children have been placed in diverse custodial arrangements, including recreation camps, boarding facilities, foster homes, and adoptive families. Investigations have identified at least forty-three sites in Russia and seven in Crimea used to house Ukrainian children, some located thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.Footnote 40 Notably, a proportion of children, particularly those designated as lacking guardianship, were channelled into Russia’s domestic child welfare and adoption systems.
By late 2023, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab had verified 314 cases of Ukrainian children entered into adoption or foster-care procedures, with at least 208 children placed into Russian families.Footnote 41 These processes were facilitated by legal amendments enacted in May 2022 that streamlined citizenship acquisition for Ukrainian children and authorised their adoption by Russian citizens without Ukrainian consent. This legal incorporation reflects an administrative strategy in which transferred children are reconstituted as Russian nationals through documentary reclassification. Evidence of altered names, birth certificates, and personal records, from infants to adolescents, indicates a systematic effort to embed children within Russian legal and social systems, complicating future repatriation efforts.Footnote 42
Legal context: Normative contestation and occupation governance
The transfer of children from occupied territory contravenes several pillars of international humanitarian and human rights law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the deportation or transfer of protected persons, including children, from occupied territory.Footnote 43 The Convention on the Rights of the Child obligates states to preserve children’s identity and family relations. Under the Rome Statute, forcible transfer constitutes a war crime, while the forcible transfer of children between national groups may meet elements of genocidal intent.Footnote 44
Russian authorities have advanced a parallel legal narrative to justify the transfers. Domestic decrees framed as humanitarian protection, combined with claims of parental consent obtained under duress, reflect a strategy of creating law-like legitimacy within a de facto state of exception.Footnote 45 Such measures align with scholarship on ‘legalised lawlessness’, where formal legal instruments are used to normalise actions that conflict with international legal norms. The historical example of child transfers under Nazi rule, similarly justified as protective, has been repeatedly invoked in legal assessments, particularly due to the post-war jurisprudence concerning the Germanisation of Polish children.Footnote 46
The historical development of child transfers from 2014 to 2024 demonstrates how a practice initially emerging under conditions of fragmented authority evolved into a systematic component of occupation governance. This evolution aligns with the theoretical logics outlined earlier: biopolitical management of identity and social reproduction; exceptional legal orders enabling actions beyond the constraints of international law; and the use of custody and displacement as instruments of political control. The next section presents empirical findings illustrating how these mechanisms have been implemented and experienced by affected families and communities.
Empirical findings
Forced displacement of children
Several patterns of displacement emerge from witness accounts that describe children being removed under conditions of coercion or deception. In some cases, armed personnel removed children during military operations under explicit threat. For example, one mother recounted that during the assault on her town, ‘the Russians took the children away from the city to Russia, without their parents, all in an organized fashion’. Children assembled for evacuation were instead diverted onto Russian vehicles.
In other instances, displacement was facilitated through ostensibly benign initiatives. One interviewee from southern Ukraine in 2022 describes how ‘they took my neighbour’s children away on a holiday, and then she herself had to travel [to Russia] to get them back’. Occupation authorities frequently promoted short-term excursions or educational programmes, only to relocate the children further into Russia once they were separated from their guardians. Regardless of the specific method, a defining characteristic is that children were not allowed to return home. Families often reported that once a child was transferred to a camp or foster facility, efforts to retrieve them required navigating unfamiliar bureaucratic processes and uncooperative officials.
The organised nature of these displacements underscores their coercive character. Numerous testimonies mention coordinated transport, with buses or trains arranged by occupation authorities to collect groups of children. A notable example occurred in autumn 2022 in Kherson oblast, where Russian-installed officials announced that all children in particular districts needed to be sent away ‘for their safety’ due to Ukrainian advances.Footnote 47 Armed personnel went door-to-door enforcing compliance, and buses transported children to Crimea and mainland Russia. Parents who protested were informed that the measure was obligatory and temporary. In practice, many of the children did not return; instead, they were dispersed to multiple sanatoria and summer camps. One witness noted that ‘they didn’t return…[and] in the empty flats, [the occupiers] began to resettle Russian citizens who had arrived’, suggesting that child displacement occurred alongside broader demographic changes in occupied areas.
While orphans and children without parental care were particularly vulnerable to immediate removal, the presence of parents did not guarantee protection. Several children with living parents were taken when parents were deemed ‘unfit’, or during episodes of chaos when families were separated. A recurrent pattern is the limited or non-existent notice provided to families. One family from Zaporizhzhia region reported being given ‘two hours to gather their children’s things’ before soldiers arrived to transfer children to a camp, intensifying the distress of the separation.
In analysing these events, our research distinguishes between the initial forced displacement, the physical removal from the home, and what follows, which we term ‘systematic abduction’. The first stage typically occurred under urgent or violent conditions (e.g., military offensives, evacuations), whereas the second stage refers to the institutional processes that formalised the separation (e.g., through adoption, re-education, or long-term custodial arrangements). Conceptually, displacement concerns the mechanisms of removal, whereas abduction and assimilation pertain to the subsequent integration of children into Russian systems. Although closely interconnected, these stages are analytically distinct: displacement separates children from their communities, while abduction and assimilation incorporates them into new, controlled environments.
Psychological trauma and health challenges
These experiences have produced significant psychological trauma and health-related challenges for affected children and their families. Witness testimonies frequently describe children exhibiting acute stress reactions, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and behavioural regressions. Parents noted younger children reverting to earlier developmental stages (e.g., bed-wetting, loss of speech) and older children experiencing nightmares or behavioural disturbances after even brief periods in Russian custody.
One mother reported that ‘my six-year-old daughter began to suffer epileptic fits as a result of all the stress’. In this case, the child had no prior history of seizures, suggesting that the cumulative stress of shelling, displacement, and fear precipitated a latent neurological condition. Another testimony documented the physical deterioration of an infant: ‘My son, who was then two years old and without diapers, was constantly wet in the basement’, resulting in persistent rash and infection. This account illustrates dual sources of harm: direct exposure to violence and the deprivation associated with displacement.
Many children witnessed traumatic events during displacement. Some saw parents or relatives beaten or interrogated during efforts to prevent removal; others observed fatalities during sieges such as that of Mariupol. One witness explained that ‘the children saw the bodies of dead civilians lying in the streets’. Physical health concerns were also significant. Testimonies describe children experiencing malnutrition, untreated illnesses, or inadequate medical care while in Russian custody. One account noted a child developing a high fever with minimal medical attention provided; another described a child returning with notable weight loss and signs of anaemia. Stress-induced medical conditions – such as epilepsy, asthma, and immune dysfunction – were also reported by clinicians who saw children upon reunification.
Trauma also extended to families. Interviews with parents and grandparents indicated persistent psychological distress associated with uncertainty about their children’s fate. A psychologist from the field team observed that many caregivers experienced ‘survivor’s guilt and chronic anxiety’, often compounded by fears of retaliation if they publicly disclosed their experiences. In such cases, the family unit experiences a form of psychological captivity: while the child is physically detained, the family lives in prolonged uncertainty and fear. Psychological trauma constitutes a major dimension of harm associated with child deportation. These effects are likely to persist long after physical reunification. As one humanitarian worker observed, ‘these children’s childhoods are effectively weaponized; the trauma is itself a strategic outcome sought by the occupiers to break the will of the community’. Such harm is reinforced through changes to education and broader coercive practices.
Disruption of education
A significant consequence of occupation and displacement has been the extensive disruption of children’s education. According to the UN, since 2022, at least 2,800 schools have been either destroyed or damaged.Footnote 48 Schools in occupied territories were closed, repurposed, or converted to Russian curricula, and many children missed months or years of formal instruction. One parent from Melitopol noted that from March to May 2022, ‘the children had no school at all – we tried to do some lessons at home, but we were trapped in the basement half the time’. As a result, many students effectively lost an academic year.
Once schools reopened, they operated using Russian curricula. Occupation authorities pressured families to enrol their children in Russian-managed institutions. Multiple testimonies referred to coercive incentives and threats: ‘They were forcing the parents to take their children to Russian school, they even offered money for it’, one resident stated. Another reported that ‘children were sent to Russian educational establishments without the parents’ consent’, especially in cases where parents had fled or been killed. Parents who resisted were sometimes threatened with removal of their children or loss of social benefits, according to several witnesses.Footnote 49
Our findings identify two main aspects of education in captivity: interruption of Ukrainian education due to conflict and occupation, and the imposition of Russian-administered education. The curricular transition entailed the replacement of Ukrainian language, history, and cultural content with Russian materials. For many Ukrainian families, this was perceived as harmful or identity-disruptive. Some attempted to maintain Ukrainian education online while appearing to comply with Russian schooling, but this approach was undermined by technical limitations and risks of detection. Over time, continued resistance often became untenable.
Educational disruption also entailed social and psychological consequences. Children relocated to Russia lost contact with their peers and teachers and frequently encountered language barriers or social stigma. Notably, Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova publicly acknowledged incidents of Ukrainian children in Russian schools experiencing bullying due to their nationality.Footnote 50 Such comments inadvertently underscore the challenges children face in adapting to new educational environments.
Ultimately, the disruption of education serves both immediate and longer-term functions within the broader context of occupation. The interruption destabilises children’s developmental trajectories and family routines, while the imposition of a new curriculum begins processes of ideological reorientation.Footnote 51 As one teacher remarked, ‘It’s not just that they stole our land; they are stealing our children’s minds by stealing their education’.
Exposure to violence
The theme of exposure to violence captures the extent to which Ukrainian children under occupation have directly witnessed or experienced acts of violence, intensifying their psychological distress and shaping their perceptions of the conflict. Although civilian exposure to violence is an inherent feature of warfare, testimonies in our study indicate that children in occupied areas were frequently placed in situations of significant risk by Russian forces, whether through deliberate actions or reckless disregard for civilian safety. In certain instances, violence was used directly against children themselves.
Many children observed severe violence during the initial invasion and subsequent phases of occupation. As noted earlier, some saw dead bodies in the streets following bombardment or urban fighting. Others witnessed the killing or injury of family members. A teenager from Bucha (Kyiv region) offered a striking account of hiding with her younger brother as Russian soldiers moved through the neighbourhood; through a crack in the door, she observed soldiers executing a neighbour. In another case, a ten-year-old boy in Mariupol lost both grandparents when the vehicle evacuating them was fired upon and subsequently hit a mine. A witness recalled on his behalf: ‘The Russians directed the car of people I knew onto mines, so the grandfather and grandmother died’. Such experiences leave profound and lasting psychological imprints on children.
In addition to witnessing violence, some children experienced violence while in custody. A number of older children reported physical abuse at the hands of occupation personnel. One sixteen-year-old boy, taken to a ‘re-education’ camp after being accused of sympathising with the Ukrainian military, recounted being slapped and kicked by guards when he refused to sing the Russian national anthem. There are also testimonies referencing allegations of sexual violence. One NGO-documented statement referred to claims that ‘the Russians sold the deported children into sexual slavery’, involving adolescent girls from Kherson region. The authors were unable to independently verify these allegations, and they may reflect exceptional or unconfirmed cases; however, their circulation within affected communities highlights the high level of fear and uncertainty surrounding the fate of missing children. The absence of transparency regarding children’s whereabouts and welfare allows such concerns, verified or not, to proliferate.
Threats of violence also functioned as instruments of control. Teachers in some Russian-administered schools reportedly threatened Ukrainian children with the involvement of soldiers or security services if they disobeyed.Footnote 52 Amnesty International documented cases in which children were warned that speaking Ukrainian or expressing pro-Ukrainian sentiments could result in punishment or physical harm.Footnote 53 One child who was later returned to Ukraine told authorities that in a Crimean camp, children who cried for their parents were placed in a dark room as punishment. Such practices constitute psychological violence, intentionally inducing fear and helplessness.
Many deported children have also been exposed to militarised environments that normalise violent behaviour. At camps in areas such as Chechnya, children – including those as young as nine or ten – were required to participate in paramilitary training activities, such as disassembling firearms and simulating combat manoeuvres.Footnote 54 Presented officially as ‘patriotic education’, these activities expose children to militarised practices and familiarise them with weapons and military culture. The presence of armed personnel, drills, and regimented discipline reinforces an atmosphere of coercion and continual monitoring.
The combination of personal trauma, such as witnessing the death of relatives, and structural violence, including militarised training and coercive disciplinary measures, is likely to produce profound psychological scars. For some children, such environments may facilitate the internalisation of militarised norms; for others, they may result in long-term emotional and psychological challenges. As subsequent sections on indoctrination and adoption show, these processes occur within a broader context shaped by the persistent threat, explicit or implicit, of violence, which constrains children’s agency and reinforces compliance.
Ideological indoctrination and Russification
One of the most significant dimensions of child deportations concerns ideological indoctrination: the systematic effort to diminish children’s Ukrainian identity and reorient their affiliations towards Russia. Once in Russian custody, whether in camps, boarding institutions, or foster placements, children are exposed to coordinated programmes of Russification. These interventions operate through formal education, structured propaganda, and controlled socialisation, effectively transforming their displacement into a form of re-education.
In camps established specifically for these children, often described in official terminology as ‘recreation’ or ‘integration’ facilities, daily routines are tightly regulated and organised around promoting Russian national identity.Footnote 55 Language regulation is central: children are required to speak Russian at all times, and the use of Ukrainian language or symbols is prohibited. One boy from Donetsk, who spent several months in a camp in Crimea, reported that counsellors threatened punishment for speaking Ukrainian or singing Ukrainian songs.Footnote 56 A girl who referred to the Ukrainian flag while colouring a picture recounted being reprimanded by staff who told her, ‘this is Russia now, forget that flag’.
The educational content in these facilities mirrors the Russian federal curriculum but with intensified emphasis on de-Ukrainianisation. Lessons in Russian history present Ukraine as not an independent state but rather an intrinsic part of Russian civilisation. According to one witness, ‘Every Monday, they had to stand and raise the Russian flag and then listen to lectures justifying the “Special Military Operation” and saying Ukrainians who resist are Nazis’. This corresponds to the nationwide Russian programme ‘Conversations about Important Things’, a weekly civic-education session. Children have also been shown video addresses by officials, veterans, or clergy who extol Russian patriotism and portray Ukraine in negative terms. Pro-Ukrainian and pro-Western attitudes, denial of Russian propagandistic narratives in justification of Russian invasion of Ukraine, and sometimes even listening to Ukrainian songs can be interpreted as ‘extremist activities’ by occupational law enforcement and result in fines, detention, forced public apologies for the misdeeds, and others. According to the claims of representatives of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, at least forty-eight minors were subjected to mandatory psychiatric treatment due to accusations of extremism.Footnote 57
‘Patriotic’ youth organisations also play an important role. Notably, Yunarmiya (the Youth Army) and the recently established ‘Movement of the First’ have been involved in enrolling or engaging deported children.Footnote 58 These organisations resemble militarised youth groups, involving uniforms, pledges, weapons training, and ideological instruction.Footnote 59 Older deported children aged twelve to seventeen have been incorporated into Yunarmiya chapters, providing them with a peer environment centred on Russian military patriotism.Footnote 60 Participation may be framed as voluntary but appears, in practice, to be strongly encouraged within camp and school structures.
In certain camps, children participate in military-style activities; for example, at a facility in Astrakhan region, they practised assembling AK-74 rifles and engaged in hand-to-hand combat drills.Footnote 61 Another camp in Chechnya organised a ‘young fighter course’ involving special forces personnel.Footnote 62 Such activities serve to normalise militarisation, implicitly portraying future military service as an expected and desirable trajectory. Indoctrination also takes more subtle psychological forms, including efforts to reshape children’s personal narratives. Testimonies suggest that foster families are encouraged to present Russia as the child’s rightful home and to disparage Ukraine. Some children were told that their Ukrainian parents had abandoned or were unwilling to care for them. Psychologists interviewed for this study observed that younger children were particularly susceptible to such narratives; some began to articulate the belief that Russia had ‘saved’ them. For instance, a recovered ten-year-old reported that her Russian foster mother repeatedly told her, ‘how lucky you are that we took you, your Ukraine didn’t need you’. These accounts demonstrate that indoctrination operates through not only overt institutional measures but also subtle, psychologically manipulative strategies that seek to reshape children’s identities and loyalties.
Evidence from children who have returned to Ukraine indicates that indoctrination effects can persist. Ukrainian social workers assisting with reintegration have observed cases in which returned children expressed confusion, ambivalence, or repeated pro-Russian narratives learned during their time in custody. One fifteen-year-old boy from Kharkiv, recovered after nine months in a Russian foster family, initially described Ukraine as ‘evil’ and Russia as having ‘protected’ him, phrases attributed to his foster caregivers. It was only through extended psychological support that he began to articulate perspectives independent of his foster environment and gradually reconnect with his Ukrainian identity, demonstrating the profound impact of sustained indoctrination on children’s sense of self.
The educational, social, and symbolic practices administered to these children are not incidental by-products of displacement; rather, they function as mechanisms through which Russian authorities seek to shape long-term political and cultural orientations. By attempting to mould children from occupied territories into Russian-identifying subjects, the occupying power aims to secure enduring influence over these populations. This theme will be further examined in subsequent analytical sections through the lenses of biopolitical governance and imperial strategy. For the present, the evidence indicates a systematic effort to influence, and in some cases fundamentally alter, the identities of thousands of Ukrainian children placed under Russian control.
Forced adoption and ‘integration’ into Russia
The final theme concerns the forced adoption and familial integration of Ukrainian children into Russia, a process that often renders separation permanent and facilitates the children’s formal incorporation into Russian social and legal structures. While some children remain in camps or state-run institutions, several hundred have been placed in Russian foster families or formally adopted. This development deepens the consequences of displacement by entrenching the child’s re-identification as Russian and significantly complicating prospects for return.
Our findings indicate that Russian authorities prioritised orphans and children without parental care for adoption.Footnote 63 Once a child was classified as ‘eligible’, a determination that in practice could arise simply from declaring that Ukrainian parents could not be located, Russian social services acted quickly to arrange custody with Russian families. The pace of these procedures is notable: testimonies describe Ukrainian children being granted Russian citizenship and placed on adoption lists within weeks of arrival. This stands in contrast to typical adoption processes, which normally involve extensive investigations and prolonged timelines. In effect, these measures created an expedited mechanism for transferring children beyond the reach of Ukrainian authorities. Presidential decrees issued in May and July 2022 streamlined adoption procedures for children from Donbas, removing requirements that would ordinarily involve verification with Ukrainian institutions.Footnote 64
High-profile Russian officials have themselves participated in the adoption of Ukrainian children. Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, publicly stated that she had adopted a fifteen-year-old boy from Mariupol in 2022.Footnote 65 In media interviews, she presented this as a benevolent act and described the boy’s gradual shift towards identifying positively with Russia. While framed as humanitarian, this narrative reflects broader dynamics of coerced reparenting. Moreover, Lvova-Belova’s involvement in child transfers was cited in the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant. Nevertheless, other regional officials have similarly publicised their fostering or adoption of Ukrainian children, practices that operate symbolically as demonstrations of political loyalty.
For the children involved, adoption typically entails dispersal across the Russian Federation, from major urban centres to regions such as Voronezh, Tyumen, and Chechnya. There is evidence of systematic placement with families connected to the military or security services.Footnote 66 This may reflect deliberate decisions to assign children to households deemed ideologically reliable or aligned with state narratives. One example concerns a soldier from Pskov region – allegedly involved in war crimes – who was reported to have adopted a child from Donbas.Footnote 67 Russian media presented him as providing a home to an orphaned Ukrainian child, without reference to the circumstances that may have produced the child’s orphanhood.
The implications of forced adoption are extensive. Legally, once adopted and naturalised, the children become Russian citizens. Under Russian law, Ukrainian parental rights are not recognised; names and personal documents may be changed, and children receive new identification papers. Reversing such adoptions would be extremely difficult even in stable diplomatic conditions, and the current conflict makes such efforts significantly more challenging. Psychologically, adoption may produce feelings of divided loyalty or confusion. Younger children, particularly those taken at early ages, may gradually lose linguistic or emotional connection with their Ukrainian families. Older children may internalise conflicting identities but have little agency to act on them.
Adoptive families often enrol the children in local educational institutions or military cadet academies, further embedding them within Russian societal structures. Some adolescent boys have been placed in military cadet boarding schools, which combine secondary education with military training. Evidence suggests that children transferred from Donetsk and Luhansk in 2015–16 subsequently entered Russian military service.Footnote 68 This trajectory highlights how children removed at a young age may, over time, be incorporated into Russia’s armed forces.
From the Ukrainian perspective, these adoptions are interpreted as reflective of intent to eliminate Ukrainian identity among affected children. Ukrainian officials have stressed repeatedly that the forcible transfer of children to another national group and their upbringing as members of that group amounts to the deliberate erosion of the cultural and familial continuity of the Ukrainian nation. As noted in a report by the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘the goal is to ensure these children do not grow up Ukrainian – it is to steal Ukraine’s future generation and make it theirs’. Accordingly, Ukrainian authorities and human rights organisations regard such adoptions as invalid under international law and call for the return of forcefully relocated Ukrainian children.
Forced adoption highlights the permanence that Russian authorities seek to impose: the transformation of children’s familial, legal, and national identities. This process represents the culmination of the broader trajectory of captivity, where displacement, psychological pressure, and indoctrination converge in a final legal and social reclassification of the child. Together with the other themes identified in our findings, forced adoption underscores the comprehensive nature of the policy, encompassing physical, psychological, cultural, and juridical dimensions.
Having outlined the empirical evidence, we now turn to the analytical discussion, examining how these practices operate within the frameworks of biopolitical governance, exceptional legal regimes, and politicised captivity, and why such strategies have been deployed in the context of the current conflict.
Analysis: Biopolitics, exception, and imperial control
The systematic deportation of Ukrainian children illustrates what Michel Foucault conceptualised as biopolitics, an exercise of power over the life course of a population. By removing and re-socialising children, the Russian state intervenes at the biological, cultural, and social foundations of the occupied society. The project is biopolitical insofar as it targets the mechanisms of population reproduction and the formation of future political subjects. By asserting control over children, the occupying power positions itself to influence the demographic and ideological contours of the future polity.
Biopower manifests in several ways in this context. First, occupying authorities leverage the vulnerability of children to influence the behaviour of the broader population. The fear of losing a child, or of witnessing such loss within the community, functioned as a powerful coercive mechanism in areas such as Kherson. As documented in our findings, some families accepted Russian passports, avoided contact with Ukrainian officials, or complied with occupation directives out of concern for their children’s safety. This dynamic reflects Foucault’s insight that biopolitical power often operates through the management of security, fear, and familial vulnerability. Control over children thus becomes a lever for indirectly governing the adult population, a biopolitical mode of ‘making live’, contingent on compliance.
Second, the deportation scheme constitutes an attempt to re-engineer the population of occupied regions. By removing children and re-socialising them as Russian, while simultaneously intimidating or displacing their families, the occupier alters the demographic composition and identity structure of these territories. For the core of pro-Ukrainian local political, cultural, and intellectual elites, groups least amenable to coercion or co-optation into Russian identity politics, occupation governance produces deliberately unliveable conditions marked by heightened risks of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture, and other forms of political repression. Those who are less politically active but still committed to maintaining a Ukrainian identity face strong pressures to relocate. Their departure leaves behind a population that is more politically indifferent or more receptive to Russian narratives, enabling occupation authorities to reorder the demographic and political landscape while filling labour shortages with migrants from the Russian Federation.
For younger children growing up under occupation, Russian authorities deploy an extensive system of educational and extracurricular programming designed to cultivate a distinctly Russian national identity, ‘patriotic’ loyalty, and adherence to state-defined ‘Russian values’. These initiatives operate as instruments of political socialisation, gradually aligning children’s normative orientations with the ideological framework of the occupying power and normalising military preparedness as a desirable civic trajectory. Historically, similar strategies have been employed by colonial and authoritarian regimes – such as the removal of Indigenous children in Canada and Australia – as a means of assimilating or transforming populations deemed problematic or resistant.Footnote 69 Russia’s policy, grounded in an ideology that questions the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationhood, follows a comparable logic of identity restructuring.Footnote 70 By erasing Ukrainian cultural lineage in the children it removes, the state aspires to weaken the continuity of Ukrainian identity in the territories under its control. This is why some legal scholars consider the practice relevant to assessments of genocidal intent, insofar as it targets the reproduction and identity of a national group.
A necropolitical dimension is also evident. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics emphasises the sovereign power to determine life exposure and death risk. Although the purpose of these deportations is not framed as immediate physical harm, the Russian state places children in circumstances where their lives become subordinated to political objectives. The evidence of adolescents being channelled into military academies and, in some instances, subsequently entering military service illustrates the willingness of the state to expose these young people to significant danger. Moreover, the removal itself occurs within a broader context of lethal violence, including indiscriminate bombardment and civilian killings. The act of separating a child from their parents can constitute a form of ‘social death’, as their previous identity and connections are severed. In some cases, this may overlap with physical risk if indoctrinated youths later participate in combat. The sovereign power asserted is therefore extensive: the state claims authority over not only the child’s identity and trajectory but also, potentially, their survival. The pervasive fear described in occupied communities, that missteps could result in the loss of one’s child, demonstrates how biopolitical control and necropolitical threat are intertwined.
Sovereign exception and legalised captivity
Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception helps us understand how these practices became possible. Occupied areas of Ukraine have effectively been governed under a continuous state of exception imposed by Russian authorities, in which normal legal orders, Ukrainian law and international humanitarian norms, are suspended or overridden. Within this framework, the population is reduced to what Agamben terms bare life: individuals who exist outside the protection of law and are subject to the unilateral decisions of sovereign power.
The deported children exemplify this condition. Stripped of their recognised legal identity, removed from their national jurisdiction, and denied access to institutional safeguards, they became entirely dependent on the occupying authority. Adoption processes, normally regulated by international conventions such as the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, were conducted unilaterally through Russian decrees. This demonstrates how, within a state of exception, law functions primarily to formalise the sovereign’s will rather than constrain it. Russian legal instruments serve to domestically legitimise acts that remain unlawful in the international arena.
Russia’s official narratives – characterising removals as ‘evacuations’ or ‘humanitarian assistance’Footnote 71 – contribute to the construction of an exceptional legal environment. By asserting that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures, the state positions its actions as permissible departures from ordinary legal constraints. As Agamben notes, such exceptions can become normalised.Footnote 72 What initially might be framed as emergency action becomes routinised policy. The occupied territories thus become spaces in which legal oversight is systematically withdrawn and acts that would ordinarily be prohibited occur with impunity.
This environment shaped the psychological and practical constraints on families. Witnesses in Kherson, for example, described the sense that ‘our rights ceased to exist’ once occupation authorities took control. Institutions that would ordinarily assist in cases of child disappearance were absent or co-opted. Attempts to file missing-person reports or seek assistance were frequently unsuccessful. Coercive threats, such as warnings that non-compliance could result in the removal of children, were credible precisely because families understood that no legal authority would intervene. The state of exception thus created the conditions under which captivity could be both enacted and maintained.
The concept of the ‘camp’ is also relevant. Russian facilities holding Ukrainian children, whether summer camps, sanatoria, or repurposed boarding schools, function as literal and figurative spaces of exception. Within these sites, children are isolated from legal protections, subjected to ideological re-education, and kept under forms of surveillance and control. In these environments, the transformation of the child into a compliant political subject is pursued within a microcosm of suspended legal norms. Taken together, these dynamics suggest a deliberate, state-driven strategy rather than a mere wartime contingency.
Imperial ideology and the logic of ‘rescue’
While biopolitics and exception explain how the deportations are enacted, a further question concerns why Russia pursues this strategy. Here, Russian official ideology provides an important explanatory dimension.Footnote 73 Russian political discourse frequently frames Ukrainians as part of a single ‘historical people’ with Russians, and independent Ukrainian nationhood as an aberration. President Putin’s 2021 essay on the ‘historical unity’ of Russians and Ukrainians articulated this position explicitly.Footnote 74 This narrative underpins the claim that removing children from Ukraine constitutes an act of ‘rescue’ or ‘reunification’, rather than abduction.
Russian officials regularly present deportations as humanitarian interventions, asserting that children are being saved from hostilities, ‘Ukrainian nationalism’, or poverty. Some commentators invoke notions of ‘ideological hygiene’, suggesting that Ukrainian influences must be removed from these children.Footnote 75 State media have highlighted cases of Ukrainian-born children integrated into Russian families or schools as evidence of successful ‘protection’. These discourses reinforce the broader ideological construct of the Russkiy Mir (‘Russian World’), which posits that populations historically linked to Russian culture should fall under Moscow’s influence. This ideological framing provides internal justification for policies that, externally, are viewed as violations of international law. It also recasts colonial or assimilationist practices as forms of benevolent guardianship.
Practical considerations complement these ideological motives. The Russian state faces demographic challenges, and the integration of Ukrainian children is sometimes portrayed as a contribution to addressing population decline.Footnote 76 These children are viewed as potential future citizens and, in some instances, potential soldiers. In occupied areas, the threat or practice of child removal also functions as a coercive tool: families may choose to flee, thereby reducing potential opposition, or remain compliant for fear of separation. This dynamic aligns with scholarship on ‘weaponised migration’, although in this instance the focus is on the forced prevention of return rather than displacement.Footnote 77 Historical precedents are relevant. Russian and Soviet governance involved various forms of child removal for political purposes, including assimilation through special schools or the separation of families following mass deportations. The current practices echo these earlier strategies, albeit in a different geopolitical context.
Combined, these motivations suggest that child deportation serves multiple strategic objectives: advancing the ideological project of the Russkiy Mir, reshaping the demographic landscape, exerting control over occupied populations, and projecting symbolic dominance. The policy is dictated not by military necessity but rather by a political vision of territorial and cultural integration.
Coercion, fear, and the instrument of captivity
Our findings show that the threat and fear of child deportation generated a pervasive atmosphere of coercion in occupied territories. This dynamic was not incidental but rather central to how occupation authorities exercised control. By using children as instruments of leverage, the governing apparatus in the occupied territories mobilised fundamental familial attachments to secure compliance.Footnote 78 This mechanism can be understood through the concept of politicised captivity alongside broader theories of fear as a modality of governance.
Within the framework of this special issue, we classify these practices as politicised captivity because the captivity of children, whether in camps or in distant foster placements, was used to achieve political ends. Families were compelled to adopt certain behaviours, such as accepting Russian passports, cooperating with occupation administrations, or refraining from resistance, under explicit or implicit threats relating to their children.Footnote 79 This dynamic extended to children who remained with their families: the possibility of forced removal influenced parental decisions. As documented in our material, families enrolled children in Russian-run schools and day-care centres despite serious misgivings, primarily to avoid attracting suspicion. Several cases involved forms of ‘pre-emptive obedience’, where families attended occupation-organised events or complied with administrative directives solely to signal loyalty and avoid scrutiny. In this sense, captivity did not need to be enacted for every child; the expectation or threat of captivity regulated conduct across the community. Families with children lived in a form of psychological captivity, with their decisions constrained by fears for their dependents.
This mechanism aligns with Foucauldian understandings of governance through affect – interpreted as the production and regulation of subjective attachments and affective orientations towards authority and belongingFootnote 80 within the strategic field of governmentality, through which power operates as the ‘conduct of conduct’ directed at populations rather than solely through juridical command.Footnote 81 The Russian occupation apparatus drew upon emotional vulnerability, particularly fear of losing one’s child, to shape behaviour. As Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion emphasises, fear can be attached to specific practices or identities, directing how subjects act. In occupied areas, visible expressions of Ukrainian identity, such as the use of the Ukrainian language, engagement with Ukrainian civil society, or refusal of Russian administrative measures, became associated with heightened risk of child removal.Footnote 82 Consequently, many residents moderated or concealed their identities, adopting self-censorship and behavioural restraint. This dynamic illustrates how governance operated through not only physical coercion but also affective conditioning.
Coercion centred on children also had a multiplier effect. Controlling one child could influence the behaviour of extended family networks and broader social circles. Families mobilised significant personal resources to retrieve children, when possible, leaving them little capacity to engage in resistance. This individualised form of blackmail fragmented potential collective action. Two specific tactics emerged prominently: threats of terminating parental rights and restrictions on communication. Parents who resisted sending children to Russian schools were sometimes warned that their children could be removed and placed in ‘more suitable environments’. When children had already been transferred, non-cooperative parents were occasionally denied access to information or communication, intensifying emotional distress. These practices contributed to the erosion of resistance networks by inducing fear and isolation.Footnote 83
From a broader security perspective, this coercive use of child deportation functioned as part of the occupier’s counter-insurgency strategy. Effective resistance relies on community support, moral confidence, and organisational stability. By making child safety contingent on compliance, occupation authorities sought to diminish the willingness to resist. Witness testimony indicates that the spread of deportation stories significantly reduced community readiness to contest occupation policies. Although resistance did occur, especially in parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, it was constrained by the pervasive fear that defiance could precipitate the loss of one’s children. By aligning coercion with emotional vulnerability, the occupation blurred the line between governance and hostage-taking. In this sense, the deported children were positioned as instruments of political leverage, reinforcing what we define as an extreme form of politicised captivity: a society regulated through the vulnerability of its youngest members.
Conclusion
The removal and re-education of Ukrainian children represents a systematic and complex strategy embedded within the broader framework of Russia’s occupation policy. This study set out to examine the strategic logic underlying these deportations and to analyse how they reflect the modalities of Russian authority in occupied territories. Our findings demonstrate that this policy constitutes a mechanism of biopolitical control enacted within a state of exception, operationalised through coercive tactics. The large-scale transfer and Russification of children is not random or opportunistic wartime abuse but rather a strategic tool of state-directed social engineering aimed at consolidating control and reshaping the occupied population. It serves immediate tactical objectives, suppressing resistance and consolidating territorial control, as well as long-term strategic aims, such as reshaping identity, population composition, and political allegiance.
Using Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, we illustrated how the occupier used children as tools for regulating life, shaping both demographic futures and present-day conduct. Parents’ fear of losing their children emerged as a powerful means of securing compliance, while the manipulation of children’s upbringing constitutes an intervention in the reproduction of political subjectivity. Agamben’s theory of the state of exception clarified how these actions were possible: the suspension of law in occupied territories created a space in which children could be treated as rightless subjects of sovereign decision, with Russian decrees providing an internal veneer of legality to actions that violate international norms. Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics further underscored the extent to which children’s lives were rendered subordinate to state objectives, whether through exposure to militarised environments or their potential future deployment in armed service.
The empirical evidence presented – derived from 178 witness testimonies and interviews with field experts – reveals the human dimension of these practices. From early cases in 2014 to mass transfers following the 2022 invasion, children have been removed from their families, subjected to indoctrination, and dispersed across vast distances. Many have been adopted into Russian families or placed in institutions where their identities are reshaped. International legal frameworks are unequivocal that the forcible transfer and assimilation of children constitute grave violations, potentially rising to the level of genocide.Footnote 84 The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants at the highest levels of the Russian state underscores the severity of these acts. Yet, as this study shows, legal prohibitions alone have not prevented their continuation, facilitated by the opacity of wartime conditions and the protective cover of Russian domestic law.
Analytically, the article demonstrates how theory can illuminate the mechanisms of this policy. Biopolitical coercion, exceptional legal orders, and imperial ideologies intersect to create a context in which child deportation becomes a tool of occupation governance. These frameworks help explain not only the outcomes – trauma, identity disruption, demographic change – but also the underlying logic: a combination of colonial ambition, demographic engineering, and coercive control.
The broader implications are profound. The deportation of thousands of children threatens the social fabric of affected Ukrainian communities and leaves enduring psychological and demographic consequences. It also raises urgent questions regarding post-conflict justice, family reunification, and the role of international institutions in preventing similar practices. Ukrainian organisations and international partners have retrieved only a fraction of the removed children; most remain unaccounted for. Ensuring their return and supporting their reintegration will constitute significant challenges in the aftermath of the conflict.
For scholarship, this case expands our understanding of captivity, coercion, and identity transformation in modern conflicts. It highlights the need for further research on the long-term trajectories of children subjected to such practices, the resilience of affected communities, and the development of international safeguards to protect children in war. Ultimately, the fate of these children reflects the central stakes of the conflict itself: the struggle over identity, sovereignty, and the future of a nation.
Jade McGlynn is the head of the Ukraine and Russia Programme at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security, King’s College London. Her research focusses on Russian identity, memory politics, and governance of the occupied territories of Ukraine. She is the author of two books, Memory Makers (Bloomsbury 2023) and Russia’s War (Polity 2023) as well as numerous scholarly and policy articles relating to Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014.
Anastasiia Romaniuk is a researcher at the Kyiv School of Economics. Prior to this, she was a digital platform analyst at Civil Network OPORA NGO. She is an author and co-author of ca. forty articles and analytical materials on social media transparency, electoral campaigning online, and the role of social media in democratic processes.
Acknowledgements
Jade McGlynn is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for funding her research on this article.
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