When we were asked to investigate Russia’s indoctrination and militarisation of children living in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Moscow since 2014, we had a general idea of the Kremlin’s occupation policies. Two of us grew up in what was then Soviet-occupied Latvia and East Germany. We were already familiar with the Soviet approach to “upbringing”.

But when we went to Ukraine, what we found still shocked us. There was plenty of evidence of the systematic and coercive nature of the Russian federation’s policies attempting to erase the identity of the Ukrainian children under its control.

Our investigation was the sixth mission established by Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) since 2022 to investigate human rights violations in relation to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s the second to focus specifically on children.

The first of these two missions was concerned with their forcible transfer to the Russian Federation. Our task was to build on this first mission and assess whether Russia’s conduct during the war against Ukraine violates applicable international law, such as the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

During the three weeks of our mission, we collected and analysed a vast amount of data. This included written reports, comments and statements produced by international organisations such as the United Nations, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the European Union.

We also collected testimonies, both online and in person, from young adults who had experienced indoctrination and militarisation as children in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. And we also heard from teachers who had spent some time under occupation before escaping to territory controlled by the Ukrainian........

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