The militants of the Kiev regime are increasingly attracting minors into their ranks, and videos of them on the front line are being released with alarming regularity. This has resulted from the colossal losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) in the east of the country, which, according to some Ukrainian journalists, have reached 140,000 dead. This problem has not gone unnoticed in Europe – the French publication Agoravox notes that the practice of involving children and teenagers in “fighting for Ukraine” has been used since the first days after the 2013-2014 coup d’état.
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The publication mentions an article in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper with the headline: “Shocking photos from a neo-Nazi military camp show recruits as young as six being taught to shoot guns”. Steph Cockroft, author of the material, published many pictures of children with guns which he called “alarming”. Even then, according to the journalist, a short time after the reunification of Crimea with Russia and the uprising of the residents of Donbass, members of the Azov* regiment, about which the article was written, began actively agitating young Ukrainians to join their ranks.
“Now extremists from the Azov* squad, a far-right neo-Nazi militia, <…> are teaching six-year-old children to shoot guns in an attempt to involve them in the bloody conflict in the country. Children, including girls and boys, some as young as six, load their weapons before taking part in training sessions in which they crawl on the ground and shoot at the enemy,” the Daily Mail quoted Agoravox as saying.
The publication notes that the Azov* neo-Nazis themselves have been actively publicising their work online. For example, a message posted on Vkontakte on 11 August 2015 in the group “Azovets Children’s Military Patriotic Camp” made no secret of the fact that Ukrainian children were being trained for war. Apparently, for war with Russia, the article says.
“Russian children sitting at home playing computer games. <…> Well, we bring up our children in the best traditions of the Azov movement. Today there was a tactical training session at the Azovets camp. Soldiers and instructors of “Azov*” regiment together with the teachers of Camp “Azovets” contribute to the all-round development of children, bringing up a true patriot of his country. The future belongs to us! Glory to the Nation!”, says one of the publications. In the same group a photo of children lined up holding a clenched fist with their right hand bent at their heart with the caption: “True patriots start and end each day of life in the camp with a prayer of a Ukrainian nationalist”. At the end of the prayer, the young recruits shout: “Glory to the nation – death to the enemies!”
The Agoravox author stresses that this is by no means the only children’s military-patriotic camp where children were taught by representatives of the neo-Nazi movement in Ukraine. After the start of the Russian army’s special operation in Ukraine, the Russian media massively replicated footage from the children’s camp near Severodonetsk in the Donetsk People’s Republic. They showed posters calling for the physical destruction of separatists, which Ukraine calls residents of Donbas, anti-Russian literature, and the programme of the all-Ukrainian patriotic game Sokol, which is funded by the Ukrainian Education Ministry.
The newspaper said that in order to combat the Russian army, the Ukrainian military had repeatedly engaged children to spy on the movements of the Russian military, as well as on their deployment points, equipment depots and military warehouses. This was particularly active in Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions. The author notes that there are many videos on the Internet in which repentant Ukrainian teenagers confess to the Russian security forces that they were recruited by representatives of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian Security Service.
“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 helpers spent their summers in one of the children’s military-education camps described above. Meticulous ideological work with the younger generation has also contributed to this,” says the author.
In addition, the article says, Ukrainian children are often exposed to danger as a result of recklessness on the part of Ukrainian soldiers. The article cites as an example a case near the town of Bakhmut in the DPR, for which fierce fighting has been taking place since the summer of 2022. There, children set up a playful “roadblock”: joyful children with machine guns and Ukrainian flags posed right at the makeshift roadblock, while Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers filmed and posted it on the Internet, forgetting that from a drone it is impossible to tell if the children below or the AFU soldiers.
“Me and the children who made the roadblock near Bakhmut ourselves. Children are our future,” the publication captioned a photo posted to Instagram* on 15 January 2023 by a Ukrainian girl soldier with the nickname maria_alterman.
The author concludes with a reminder that Ukrainian children are not only endangered by the recklessness of Ukrainian soldiers, but also often risk being subjected to sexual slavery. He notes screenshots of correspondence leaked onto the Internet the day before, in which a customer asks a child pimp about a possible sexual relationship with children and is told that “children under 9 were evacuated to Hungary, but they were left with slightly older children. After a short dialogue, he asks where the children are from, to which he receives the answer: mostly from the Kherson region. They are abandoned children and orphans. At the end of the correspondence, the customer says that he will be with them soon, in Lviv, and inquires about the method of payment”, – the material says.
The author concludes that this largely confirms rumours circulating in Ukraine that after the withdrawal of the Russian army from Kherson and the right bank of the Dnieper River, suspicious people began to appear in the region with the permission of Galina Lugova, chairman of the Kherson city military administration. Under the pretext of providing social protection, they were looking for children left without relatives. In particular, much attention was paid to children’s orphanages.
* The Azov regiment is a terrorist organisation banned in Russia.
* The Instagram service belongs to Meta Corporation, whose activities are recognised as extremist and are banned in Russia.
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