Russia will make basic military training a required part of the school curriculum for fifth-graders in occupied Donetsk, Makiivka, Dokuchaievsk, and Mariupol from 1 September. The new "Cossack classes" combine ideological instruction with combat-related drilling, and unlike Yunarmia and other Russian paramilitary programs that operate outside school hours, they will sit inside the obligatory program. Refusing to participate will mean leaving school.
The shift moves militarization from opt-in to compulsory. Yunarmia drew willing children after school. Cossack classes capture every fifth-grader in four occupied cities—the children who, in less than a decade, will be of military age. Russia is converting its monopoly on schooling in occupied territory into a draft pipeline.
Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets called the move part of a "deliberate, considered policy and strategy of war." He asked the International Criminal Court, Ukrainian law enforcement, and the international community to recognize the systematic militarization of Ukrainian children on temporarily occupied territories as a crime against humanity.
"Currently these actions remain without proper legal evaluation," Lubinets wrote on Facebook on 6 May.
"The systematic militarization of Ukrainian children on temporarily occupied territories is unprecedented in modern history. How can the world continue to be silent in the face of this crime? Silence is complicity in a crime against children."
A 210-facility network
Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab documented at least 210 facilities across Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory where Ukrainian children have been held since February 2022. Pro-Russian re-education runs at 62% of those sites. Military training—combat drills, parades, drone assembly, grenade throwing, tactical medicine—takes place at roughly 19%. Yale researchers concluded Russia operates "a potentially unprecedented system of large-scale re-education, military training, and dormitory facilities capable of holding tens of thousands of children from Ukraine for long periods of time."
The Russian government directly manages more than half of those sites.
From extracurricular to mandatory
Until now, much of the militarization sat in the margins of children's days. Russia routes Ukrainian children into Yunarmia ("Youth Army"), Orlyata Rossii ("Eaglets of Russia"), Voin ("Warrior"), and Zarnitsa 2.0—uniformed organizations running drills, parades, ideological camps, and lessons in Russian military history. On 17 February, occupation authorities in Luhansk Oblast marked a so-called "Day of the Russian Cadet."
These programs ran alongside school. Cossack classes will run inside it. Occupation authorities are calling the new arrangement "the Cossack component in the educational system." Multiple Ukrainian outlets reported that fifth-graders—children who turned 10 or 11 this year—will be required to attend.
The line keeps moving inward.
The closed loop
This is not only what is happening to children inside occupation. According to Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation and the Bring Kids Back UA initiative, children taken from temporarily occupied territories are already being used in operations against Ukraine, including efforts to identify and recruit teenagers in Ukrainian-controlled territory for sabotage and intelligence work. Russia takes them, militarizes them, and turns some of them back toward the country they came from.
The ICC issued arrest warrants in March 2023 for Vladimir Putin and Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the unlawful deportation of children, classifying it as a war crime. But no court has yet named the system of indoctrination and military training inside that deportation pipeline as a crime against humanity, distinct from the act of transfer itself. Lubinets argues this gap is itself the failure.
The Cossack classes announcement deepens it. A war crime is conduct in war. A crime against humanity is policy. Russia is calling its policy "a component of the educational system."
Ukraine has returned 2,000 children from Russian control since 2022. Tens of thousands more remain. The 42-country international coalition working on returns has not yet been matched by a parallel international effort to give the system holding them a legal name.
Mariupol fifth grade
Russia's 2022 siege of Mariupol killed thousands of civilians and leveled much of the city. The fifth-graders who will sit in Cossack classes this September were five or six years old when it happened. They lived through the basements, the airstrikes on the maternity hospital and the drama theater, the bodies in the streets. Some of them lost parents.
From September, they will be required to learn combat formations from the army that destroyed their city.
