Three Ukrainian guests joined our gathering at Camp Kotok and described their eyewitness experiences in Ukraine as they confronted Putin’s Russian military forces and their ruthless attacks. Much more on that is coming from me in future writings.
One Russian tactic is kidnapping Ukrainian children, sending them to camps, and “brainwashing” them. The precedent in history is the Hitler Youth initiatives of Nazis in the 1930s preceding and during World War Two. Whether this topic makes it into the negotiations in Alaska remains to be seen.
Here’s the summary from the Institute for the Study of War (https://understandingwar.org/):
Key Takeaways:
- Russia may be decentralizing adoption programs for Ukrainian children in a manner that will complicate Ukraine’s efforts to track and repatriate its children.
- The emergence of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Ministry of Education and Science-run adoption database listing Ukrainian children is an inflection compared to previous Russian efforts to centralize and streamline adoption processes under the federal database.
- Russian government ministries are paying to send Ukrainian children to Russian summer camps, museums, and national parks, likely as part of the broader Russian effort to use such programs to instill pro-Russian sentiments in Ukrainian children.
- The Donetsk Oblast occupation administration is preparing to leverage Ukrainian youth into reconstruction projects in order to offset labor costs and build youth buy-in for the occupation.
- Russia is using the new “Align with Heroes” program to further its efforts to indoctrinate and militarize children in occupied Crimea.
- Russia continues to use oblast-level offshoots of the federal Time of Heroes program to curate a loyal and military-minded civil servant class in occupied Ukraine.
For more detailed discussion of each of the takeaways above, here’s the link to the entire article:
“RUSSIAN OCCUPATION UPDATE, AUGUST 12, 2025” | ISW,
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-occupation-update-august-12-2025
(Screenshot of the Russian Adoption website (usynovite.ru) where Ukrainian children were confirmed to be among the children listed.)
