Russian state or near-state propaganda systematically works with a children’s audience. For them, children are the object of materials for stories. What is far less obvious is that behind this is not a set of scattered propaganda techniques by individual editorial offices, but a system built during 2022–2026, with a clear division of functions between the school, extracurricular organizations, security structures, and the media, including military correspondents as a separate link in this chain.
The goal of the research is an analysis of the practice along four directions that are most frequently recorded in the news and reports of military correspondents.
Children in the uniform of the “Yunarmiya” and cadet classes
In 2019, in the occupied part of Donbas and in Luhansk, the military-patriotic organization “Young Guard – Yunarmiya” was created. It operated on the principle of the Russian “YunArmiya,” which was founded in 2016 on the initiative of Sergei Shoigu. At the beginning of 2022, in the so-called “LNR,” they were already talking about several thousand participants and dozens of detachments.
On 2 November 2022 — the official opening of the regional branch of the All-Russian movement “Yunarmiya” in Luhansk.
This happened already after the so-called “referendums” and the announcement of the so-called “accession” of the LNR to the Russian Federation. A representative of the main headquarters of the Russian “Yunarmiya” was present at the founding meeting.
A cadet corps often replaces the ordinary school program as a whole — for example, school No. 19 in Antratsyt (Luhansk region), which until 2014 was an ordinary Ukrainian school, and now children “from the first grade walk in uniform, and classes are held with them at the shooting range.”
In February 2023, a camp was announced. The goal (from the application to the Presidential Grants Fund No. 24-2-007548): “testing new forms of patriotic education of teenagers” for the creation of the movement “Children’s Academy of Friendship of Peoples ‘Akhmat’,” with the active participation of children from the families of participants in the “SVO.” Funding of more than 6.3 million ₽ through the ANO “Center for Humanitarian and Cultural Initiatives ‘Rassvet’.”
The instructors were active servicemen of the “big Akhmat” and “other worthy people.” The training was “intensified, serious and close to army standards.” Earlier, in 2022, the “Special Forces University” in Chechnya accepted about 200 “difficult teenagers” from occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
A journalistic investigation by “24 Channel,” conducted in November 2024 on the basis of documents obtained from the KibOrg group, showed the mechanism for selecting children into the “YunArmiya”: participation in this project is an indicator of “reliability” and a good character reference for students. In 2024, children from the occupied part of Luhansk were taken to march in Novosibirsk.
A report by “Pervyi Zaporozhsky” from 2026 describes a specific visual form of presentation: at school assemblies that more closely resemble a military parade, children in pilotkas and with St. George ribbons sing in chorus a drill song about the desire to “Serve in the army.” According to the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, among those who later died at the front are former “yunarmeytsy,” in particular Dmytro Kotov, Ivan Shifman, and Illia Moskvitin are mentioned. Statistics of children involved in the military structures of the RF:
Based on a BBC report (which was later retold by “Ukrainska Pravda”), for those who joined the “Yunarmiya” — a separate table in the cafeteria, gifts, medals, trips, the favor of teachers; for those who refused — second-class status. This is not so much coercion by force as a constructed system of status incentives, which from a pedagogical point of view works even more effectively than direct pressure.
Drill training in schools, or how children are made into future military personnel
Simply put, this is a system that has been operating since the founding of the “YunArmiya.” According to the Center for National Resistance of Ukraine, from 1 September 2024, UAV control is being introduced as a compulsory subject for all students in the occupied territories. The occupation authorities promised to equip every school with training drones and to attract military instructors. According to Yale HRL, in at least one of the institutions studied, children were directly involved in the production of drones, and not only in classes on controlling them.
Letters to the “heroes of the SVO”
The most massive practice and at the same time the hardest to pin down in terms of the time of its emergence, the genre of the letter to a soldier has roots going back to the times of the USSR. Since 2022, “Letter to a Soldier” campaigns have become a de facto standard element of school life in Russia and in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
A journalist from “Argumenty i Fakty” undertook to deliver to Donetsk a folder with drawings by students of Moscow school No. 1238, which confirms the fact of a link between children’s creativity and the front.
“Last bells” and graduations as platforms for recruitment into UAV units
In the occupied territories. RBC-Ukraine (28 May 2026), citing the Center for National Resistance, reports that “last bells” there have been deliberately turned into platforms for selecting graduates for UAV units. The mechanics are described in detail: even before the end of the school year, collaborator teachers pass to the Russian security structures lists of students who attended militaristic clubs, drone-control classes, or the course “Fundamentals of the Defense of the Fatherland”; parents are not allowed into the events themselves under the pretext of anti-terrorist measures, which removes the only layer of family control from the process.
In 2026, a contract is presented as a technological and “safe” alternative to ordinary service, with payments, but legally does not guarantee that a pilot will not be transferred to an assault unit.
Military correspondents as a channel for feeding ideas to children
Military correspondents personally come to the schools of the DNR, LNR, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, show documentary films about the “SVO” and “discuss with the war correspondents the events in the zone of the special military operation” directly with a children’s audience — that is, the function of the war correspondent here shifts from the journalistic (to tell an adult audience) to imposing a perception of the war.
Nikolai Dolgachov’s own program “Our Military Correspondents” (Telegram broadcast on the “Nashi” channel) is also organically embedded in this contour: the format presents war correspondents as heroic storytellers “from the front line,” whose stories are broadcast, among other things, through school and youth patriotic events from the first and second chapters.
As a result of the research, one can conclude that:
The Russian system of working with children in the occupied territories is not a set of random propaganda tricks, but a coherent, multi-level machine built in 2022–2026. The school, extracurricular structures (“Yunarmiya,” cadet classes, the “Movement of the First”), security formations (“Akhmat,” the former “Wagner”), state grants, military correspondents, and even “last bells” work as a single conveyor.
The goal of this system is obvious — to erase Ukrainian identity and raise a generation that will perceive war against its own country as the norm and a “civic duty.” Children in this scheme are not accidental participants in stories, but a deliberately used resource of propaganda and a future military reserve.
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