A new Russian propaganda film has just been released about Ukrainian children being brainwashed during so-called ‘integration sessions’ in Russian ‘children’s camps’. While claiming to be aimed at healing the children’s war-related trauma, the title of the film says it all. «СВОи дети» could just mean ‘one’s own children’ and reiterate the propaganda refrain from the film that there are no alien children. The first three letters are capitalized, however, and stand for ‘special military operation’, Russia’s euphemism for its war of aggression against Ukraine. These are ‘Special Military Operation children’ and the ‘integration sessions’ are aimed at indoctrinating Ukrainian children into believing that they are ‘Russian’ and that they should ‘defend’ Russia, including in war.
The film, like the project called ‘The Day after Tomorrow’, is closely connected with Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s ‘children’s commissioner’, and, like him, under an arrest warrant on war crimes charges from the International Criminal Court over their role in the deportation to Russia of Ukrainian children. The project is supposedly about providing psychological help to children from occupied territory and run by the state foundation ‘Country for Children’. This is run by Alexei Petrov who is also an adviser to Lvova-Petrova. Petrov is around 30 and only began concealing considerable online links with white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements in August 2023, following uncomfortable questions from Reuters. He has been under EU sanctions since 16 December 2022 for being “involved in the illegal transportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and their adoption by Russian families."
The film was first shown at the Gorky Cinema Studios on 26 May and is now available at the online cinema Okko. The 1 hour and 11 minutes are all essentially advertising the ‘Day after Tomorrow’ project and carefully manipulating images and texts to ensure that viewers are not inclined, as they should be, to point out that the trauma, the injuries and loss that the young people need to recover from were all caused by Russia’s aggression. Nor did the producers trust any young people to present the ‘right narrative’. Important stories looked into the oldest of the young people – Dmytro Mizonov, an 18-year-old student from occupied Donetsk. He appears to be a regular participant in all such state projects and on his own social media pages expresses support for Russia and opposition to the actions of Ukraine’s Armed Forces and the Ukrainian authorities.
The ‘integration sessions’ involved here may be temporary however others have not been, with children since 2022 sometimes held for months or longer in camps on occupied territory or in Russia. Those children and young people whom Ukrainian civic organizations have managed to rescue and bring back to government-controlled Ukraine have generally given accounts of aggressive brainwashing and the total impossibility of expressing any independent views or, God forbid, support for Ukraine.
Moscow is spending vast amounts of money on all forms of indoctrination and all measures aimed at destroying Ukrainian identity in occupied parts of Ukraine, with these including the so-called Yunarmia ‘youth army’ and other pro-regime movements, as well as school textbooks which present a terrifying distortion of historical events and glorify Russia’s military aggression.
Although the Kremlin and Lvova-Belova became a little more circumspect and stopped boasting about children being forcibly abducted from Ukraine and adopted in Russia, the situation with deportations and forced adoptions has changed little.
In April 2026, investigative journalists reported having found the names and photos of four children abducted back in 2022 from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home on a Russian state adoption database [усыновите рф]. The children were clearly being offered for adoption, with no mention made of the fact that they are from Ukraine and were taken to Russia by force.
A month earlier, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine published its latest findings on Russia’s deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation. It found that these were on a major scale and systematic, and “amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes”.
