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.
