Last June, a trio of uniformed Russian teens clutching a Soviet-era banner goose-stepped past a memorial to victims of Nazi fascism. Next to them, a dozen younger children stood awkwardly to attention as they watched soldiers and local politicians coat the memorial in fresh flowers. “The history of our country will never be forgotten,” announced a local functionary. “Never forget that you are citizens of a mighty nation!”
His audience — a gaggle of pre-teens — were about to be inducted into the Youth Army, the Russian state’s paramilitary youth group for children aged six and up. Founded by the Kremlin’s Ministry of Defence in 2016 as a means to prepare children physically, intellectually, morally, and “spiritually” for war, it now counts 1.3 million members and an annual state subsidy of $80 million. The inductees repeated, like the 300,000 other youths who joined the group in 2022, an oath of allegiance: “I swear to remain forever true to the Fatherland and to the Brotherhood of the Youth Army!”
This is a scene played out in hundreds of locations across the Russian Federation as the state seeks to militarise its young people by transforming them into warriors ready to do battle with internal traitors, as well as the West and Ukraine. New recruits spend their free time gathering humanitarian aid for refugees and the “evacuated” from Ukraine, learning about Russia’s historic military feats in the face of an aggressive West, meeting heroised “veterans” of Russia’s current war, and practising military skills — first aid, tactical exercises, and even live firing — to prepare them for conflict. These children are, as one Ukrainian commentator puts it, learning “to die for the Motherland”.
But this particular initiation did not take place in Russia, and these were not Russian children. These were Ukrainian children in occupied Mariupol. Just one month after the end of Russia’s brutal siege, which razed the town and left as many as 25,000 civilians dead, Russia kickstarted an indoctrination campaign to turn Ukraine’s children into Russian citizens and warriors. The Ukrainian state feared that the project would successfully feed yet more sacrificial bodies into an ailing Russian war machine.
After all, Youth Army members are told that Ukraine is a fascist nation that threatens to obliterate Russia — just as the Nazi invaders did in 1941. It’s no coincidence that the heavily publicised enlistment of these first dozen Mariupol “young soldiers”, as they are known, took place at a monument to the Soviet war effort, or that Mariupol’s “unit” was officially formed on May 9, the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The speaker at the ceremony implored the young listeners to “follow in the footsteps” of past soldiers in “liberating our brother nation from fascism”.
After its illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian government launched a wave of youth “re-education” projects that spanned changes to the school curriculum, the creation of “volunteer” projects for local youths, the reinstatement and recreation of Soviet-era monuments and rituals to war, and, in 2016, the creation of Youth Army “units” on the Crimean peninsula.
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