CAITLIN Howarth, the director of operations for the Conflict Observatory team at Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory, at a briefing on Russia’s camps for children. Excerpts:
The camps in Russia
In a time of war, given all of the challenges and the perfectly natural suspicions that one might have, why would a parent even send their child to a camp like this in the first place? That’s a normal question for anyone to have when approaching this report.
So I decided I wanted to pull out some of the answers to that question that emerged through data. Here are a few things that parents voiced.
They said that they wanted to help protect their children from fighting. A lot of these families live in frontline areas where shelling was a routine occurrence, blackouts were routine, and there was a lot of sort of day-to-day impact of the war on their everyday lives.
They wanted their children to have access to intact sanitation. Imagine what it would be like if your child didn’t have access to a shower for weeks on end or they couldn’t easily wash their clothes or simply wash their dishes. That’s a lot of change and disruptions to just regular routines and regular hygiene.
They wanted their children have access to nutritious food that was unavailable at home. They wanted to be able to make sure that their children can have fruits and vegetables that maybe weren’t going to be available, to things that weren’t always shelf-stable, things that weren’t going to come out of a can.
And they wanted to be able to give their children a break that their families could not afford. A number of children that are documented in this report come from families that are not necessarily high-income, and these trips are completely paid for by the Russian state. These are not opportunities that would have been available through any other means, and everything was presented as all expenses paid and round trip. There was nothing that was supposed to be unaccounted for as part of this.
What is at stake
It’s also important to keep in mind that for many parents in many towns and oblasts, they have seen children not only go to these camps but successfully come home from these camps. And they had teachers – teachers who spend not just one year or one class but multiple years with their students building relationships with parents, building relationships with their families over generations – telling them that it was safe and advisable, that they should send their children to these camps, that this was the best possible thing for them to do. And they followed that advice.
One mother sent her child to the Medvezhonok. She sent her daughter. Her daughter has a chronic illness and she has seizures. She wanted to give her daughter a rest. For any of you who have ever struggled yourself or have a child who has a chronic illness, you know just how much stress can have an impact on that part of an illness. And her daughter’s return of course was then stopped. Those in Medvezhonok decided to suspend all returns once Ukrainian forces had successfully retaken the Kharkiv Oblast.
When her daughter’s return was suspended, her mother was able to find a phone number for the camp director. And she got in touch and she wanted to know, “When is my daughter going to come home?” The director told her mother that her daughter would not be returned to Ukraine.
You send your child out to try and simply get a rest, you try to do the best possible thing for them, and this is the reality. The situation changes. The children who had come home safely before, the situation that you’ve been told will happen shifts under your feet. That is the situation for parents in Ukraine who are trying to get any information about their children, and that is information that is incredibly hard to come by.
The data
Over and over and over again in the data that we collected, we see that when children are going to these camps information does not necessarily follow. Parents are not consistently given contact information for camp officials. Sometimes they are told – in some cases we see that they are told to connect to a village council instead of actually connecting to camp officials.
Sometimes some parents report back that they are only able to get information sometimes through the news media or secondhand just through word of mouth through other parents just trying to exchange information with each other. It’s only in this fashion that they may find out that their child – in one case we found that a child had been moved from a camp in Russia-occupied Crimea to the Republic of Adygea. That is a completely different region away. For those of you – for those who are familiar with the United States, this would be as if someone had sent their child to a coastal retreat and then found out that their child had been moved well into the central mountains, like several hours journey away. That parent then had to complete a completely different journey in order to retrieve their child.
And some parents report that they are told not to send cell phones with their children to camp so that they then do not have an independent form of communication to reach out to their children.
One girl who was in Medvezhonok allegedly had a nervous breakdown when her mother did not arrive to retrieve her after the camp suspended all returns. And another parent who allegedly witnessed this event said that the girl had that nervous breakdown, was subsequently hospitalized, and that parent reported this to the girl’s mother. That mother has not been able to obtain any information about their daughter’s whereabouts or health, and at the time of this report we have not been able to confirm any information about that child or her status.
So it’s important for us to understand that harm does come from this lack of information and from parents and children having these severed contacts with one another or inconsistent contact with one another. This is why some of the recommendations in this report exist about re-establishing those ties.
What we want to achieve
We want to make sure – and Medvezhonok, we think, is a particularly egregious example, but there are several others where it’s clear that the changing status on the front line is a factor in whether or not children are allowed to go home. Medvezhonok is one where 300 children were stopped from going home after the status of a critical area – in this case, Kharkiv – had changed hands in the war. One camp official at Medvezhonok told a boy that his return home was going to be conditional. He and the other children could go back if Russia recaptured Izyum. Another boy was told that he could not go home because his views specifically were too pro-Ukrainian. He would not be allowed to go back.
This is exactly why it’s so important to understand the role of the re-education programmes and how important they are to this. And I want to go back to the goal of the topic of this academic instruction. These are tried and true methods for re-education and for indoctrination. They have a long history; these are not the first times that these methods are being rolled out.
One of the things that I want to point you to – it’s easy to overlook – we have so many citations, so many endnotes, so I want to draw your attention to one in particular. You’ll see on page 18 – this actually in one of our sections looking at some of the leaders involved. There’s a quote from Sergei Kravtsov. He’s the minister of education for Russian Federation, and he has helped to facilitate these camps through some of the curricula oversight. He also visited children at at least one camp and a university exchange program, and he delivered a lecture. And I wanted to draw your attention to one of the quotes we drew.
He speaks in some detail during this lecture about a vision that Russia likes to purport about this idea of one country and only one common culture, one language. This is – this does not have any basis in any credible history of Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian language, or Ukrainian history. This is disinformation that is being spread. And fortunately, this is why I wanted to point you specifically to this – you’ll see it’s at endnote number 130. The page reference here is on page 18.
There’s an extensive book that was actually compiled by Internews Ukraine that goes into the history of disinformation that has been practiced by the Russian Government over decades. And so I strongly urge you to go and look in those – look into those resources. This is through Ukraine’s own scholarship and it has a much longer history than simply this most recent conflict.
I would also urge you to take a look through and also at some of the additional military training that is occurring in these camps. It isn’t at just one site and it isn’t just sort of a passing thing to be concerned about. In some cases, I think Russia may try to characterize this as something that, oh, this is done for only a handful of troubled couple kids. This has been documented in at least two camps, one in Russia-occupied Crimea and one in Chechnya. The camp in Chechnya is – currently has 14- to 17-year-old boys, and what you’ll see – there’s a photo I want to draw your attention to.
Right in the center of the photo you’ll see a group of three men. They are, from left to right, Vladimir Khromov, Zamid Chalayev, and Akhmed Dudayev. Khromov is a representative of Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights. Chalayev is a hero of Russia and someone with a notable track record of human rights abuses, including direct connection to extrajudicial killing for (inaudible) unit. And Dudayev has very senior-level responsibility within the Chechen Republic. We can’t stress how important it is that all of these men are responsible and part of bringing – they’re a central part of bringing this system to fruition. And the accountability that needs to be leveled needs to go all the way to the top, because that is who is actively involved in a very intimate way with the establishment, the maintenance, and the perpetuation of this system.
Previous research
I would also stress that there were attempts prior – there was work that was done prior to the full-scale invasion as well to identify children that were in state-run institutions in occupied so-called LPR and DPR that were basically pre-identified for deportation to mainland Russia. And those operations were then carried out rapidly in the very early stages of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in those territories. So it’s important to keep in mind that this entire – like, the full scale of this operation has been a part of the invasion from its very earliest moment. There’s been no part of this war where the children have not been a factor, including the most vulnerable children of Ukraine.
For military training, a couple of details are interesting here. So for – at the – one of the camps that’s near Grozny in Chechnya, the course that was taken specifically sort of described as a course for a young fighter, and that took place at the Russian University of Special Forces. So this is not at a – this is not at a facility that would otherwise be used for typical teenage recreation. This is at a military facility with military equipment. The – one of the camps – and this would be the one and Russia-occupied Crimea – is organized by what’s called the Yunarmia movement. And this is – this is important. This is a – sort of a patriotic public movement, so-called, that’s important to be kind of understood as one that has – is all about sort of, like, the indoctrination towards sort of a – of Russian unity movement.
And in that particular context, one person – Vladimir Kovalenko, who’s the chief of staff of the regional branch of Yunarmia in Sevastopol – was present at that camp. And so we see in these instances that some of the training involved – and we do call it training specifically because in these cases it’s not just – it’s not just sort of kids sitting in a classroom and sort of hearing a lecture or a talk by different instructors. It’s actually handling firearms; it’s going over military courses. We have photographic and video footage of them going through obstacle courses, engaging in physical training, sort of, like, handling vehicles, handling weapons, and as we said, being in the presence of some people who we would consider – these are some serious men in the —in armed forces. So for those reasons we certainly take this very seriously.
That being said, we do not have documentation of any deployment of these young boys. So I do want to stress that. That’s one stage that we have not seen.
