Ukraine's stolen children are forced to Putin's war machine

KIDNAPPED Ukrainian children are being put to work in weapons factories making drones that will be used in Vladimir Putin's war against their compatriots, research by Yale University has found.

- By Zak Garner-Purkis

Since Moscow launched its initial attack on Crimea more than a decade ago, Russia has been abducting kids from Ukraine on an “industrial scale”.

The policy went into overdrive after the 2022 full-scale invasion and there are now more than 20,000 recorded cases of state-sponsored child kidnapping.

Shocking details of what the stolen youngsters are being forced to do have been uncovered by researchers at The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab in a report that identifies 210 suspicious facilities in Russia and the occupied territories. It says these sites are being used for a “potentially unprecedented system of large scale reeducation, military training”.

Combining publicly available information, such as Kremlin announcements and social media posts, with high-resolution satellite imagery, HRL pinpointed locations stretching over 3,500 miles and 59 regions “from the Black Sea across Siberia to the eastern coast of the Pacific Ocean”.