When the Kremlin Failed to Brainwash Them as Children, They Plotted Their Escape(Escaping occupation)

3 comments

1. When the Kremlin Failed to Brainwash Them as Children, They Plotted Their Escape
   Dozens of Ukrainian children have defied a decade under Russia’s propaganda machine in occupied Ukraine and fled to Ukrainian-held territory
   Ivan Sarancha, 18, recently fled Russian-occupied Luhansk, the Ukrainian city where he was born.

   By

   Oksana Grytsenko

   | Photographs by Justyna Mielnikiewicz for the WSJ

   Aug. 29, 2025 6:00 pm ET

   KYIV, Ukraine—A generation of children who grew up in Russian-occupied Ukraine and whose schooling was saturated in Kremlin propaganda is coming of age.

   Most of them only speak Russian and their upbringing taught them that the government in Kyiv was the enemy.

   But the Kremlin’s indoctrination campaign—designed to convince them they are Russian—has failed to persuade all of those growing up under occupation. Some have discovered their Ukrainian identity and pursued it even against the will of their parents and at the risk of repression from the occupying authorities.

   In a few cases, discovering the truth about their background has prompted the young people to plot an escape from Russian-held territory as soon as they turn 18. Many of them go alone.
   Kyiv cityscape with highway traffic.
   Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, has resisted Russia’s invasion.

   Earlier this year, when Ivan Sarancha was on the cusp of adulthood he set in motion his plan to flee from occupied Luhansk, the Ukrainian city where he was born.

   Russia’s attempt to brainwash him had begun years earlier, the day Russian paramilitaries stormed his elementary school and tore down the Ukrainian flag in 2014. He was 7 years old and his pro-Kyiv grandfather, a priest, was hounded out of Luhansk by the Russian paramilitaries and their local allies. But Sarancha’s immediate family remained.

   His father, he says, subscribed to the Kremlin’s idea of a good Ukrainian: speaking Russian and wanting Ukraine to be part of Russia. When their house was destroyed by shelling, the family moved into his grandfather’s abandoned apartment and threw out the Ukrainian book collection he had kept there.

   Sarancha learned from Kremlin-sanctioned textbooks and was suffused in Russian culture. He accepted an idealized view of Soviet military victories, the infallibility of the Russian Orthodox Church and Moscow’s authority over Ukraine.

   Around 600,000 school-age children are trapped in occupied Ukraine, where the Kremlin is seeking to indoctrinate them by insisting on their Russianness and denying the existence of Ukraine as a nation.

   Russian propaganda in schools and cultural events focuses on glorifying the military, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet victory in World War II. Even gentle criticism of the official line can lead to jail time.

   The areas under occupation form part of the territory in the south and east of the country that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed in 2022 and which he wants to control in full in return for ending the fighting in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians living there speak Russian as their mother tongue and share cultural and ethnic links with Russians.
   Luhansk People’s Republic passport.
   Sarancha’s ID was issued by Russia’s self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic.

   It wasn’t until Sarancha was 12 that he began to question the narrative his family and schoolteachers had fed him. Chatting online as he played a computer game with boys from Dnipro, a Ukrainian-controlled city further west, he asked if they were allowed to talk with him since they were supposed to be enemies.

   “How can we be enemies? You live in Ukraine, and so do we,” he recalls them responding.

   Moscow’s campaign to inculcate children in occupied areas with the Kremlin’s worldview began after its covert invasion in 2014 as a way to embed itself as the ruling power in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and parts of the Donbas.

   But even there, dozens of young adults have found the will to flee, according to Right to Protection, a Kyiv-based organization in Ukraine that provides escapees with legal support.

   Zhan-Evelin Biankpin Akassi set off from the occupied city of Donetsk in the summer of 2023, a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion, at age 17. Her solo trip took her through Russia and Belarus to Ukraine, where exhausted at the border she got goosebumps when a Ukrainian woman called out to her: “Young lady, why are you acting like you are not one of us?”
   Portrait of Zhan-Evelin Biankpin Akassi in Kyiv.
   Zhan-Evelin Biankpin Akassi set off from occupied Donetsk in 2023.

   Akassi didn’t respond until the woman offered her some food and she gratefully accepted. It was the first time she heard someone addressing her in Ukrainian in a decade. “I felt that my right to be Ukrainian had been stolen from me,” she says.

   It isn’t illegal to leave occupied areas but Russian authorities don’t want people to go into parts of Ukraine they don’t control and can make it difficult for them to cross the border. Those leaving don’t cross the line between occupied and non-occupied Ukraine and don’t say they are going to Ukraine, but that they intend to travel elsewhere in Europe.

   Children often use the internet to find information that undermines the Kremlin’s propaganda or to connect with Ukrainians living in areas not under occupation. The escapees who spoke to The Wall Street Journal said Ukraine represented a homeland of freedom and opportunity, compared with the militaristic authoritarianism on display in Russia-occupied lands.

   Sarancha’s gaming friends told him that Luhansk had been captured by Russians and he was living under occupation. He started reading Ukrainian and Western websites, learning the real history of Ukraine’s independence from Russia rather than the distorted version he was taught at school. It created arguments at home with his pro-Russian father.
   Portrait of Ivan Sarancha, who relocated from occupied Lugansk to Ukrainian-controlled territory, wearing a shirt that says “Make Ukraine Nuclear Again.”
   Sarancha feared that his father might discover his plan to leave and alert Russia’s security service to stop him.

   By the age of 15, Sarancha was convinced that Ukraine was a separate, sovereign nation, free from Russian control, and the city where he lived was excluded from that freedom. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and assault on Kyiv that year made up his mind that he should escape the occupied part of Ukraine. But he was still too young to travel on his own and retained a hope that the Ukrainian army would liberate his city.

   He took a job at a coffee kiosk in the spring of 2024 to save some money for his escape, and applied for a Russian passport after telling his parents he wanted to make a short trip abroad.

   In January this year, just a few days before his 18th birthday, Sarancha grabbed his rucksack and a small bag and took a bus to Rostov-on-Don, a city in Russia and about 120 miles southeast of Luhansk. Once there, he took photos to send to his parents in the following days to give the impression that was where he was. But his real destination was Ukraine, via Moscow and Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
   The charity Save Ukraine helps Ukrainians escape occupation, offering them shelter and legal assistance.

   He had no help other than from Google Maps and some advice from others he had found on YouTube who had undertaken similar journeys. He feared that his father might discover his plan and alert Russia’s security service to stop him.

   Ukrainian officials at the consulate in Minsk, where he went to get papers to allow him to enter Ukraine, nearly kicked him out, thinking he was Russian. He was afraid to speak Ukrainian in the pro-Russian country. His hands trembled in the taxi to the Ukrainian border, where guards questioned him for four hours before they would let him pass.
   SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

   What does the future hold for the children in occupied Ukraine? Join the conversation below.

   Once across the frontier, Sarancha gathered the courage for something even harder than his escape: telling his parents where he was. His mother cried. His father called him a traitor.

   Once in Kyiv, it took Sarancha months to obtain Ukrainian documents, find a job and adjust to life in Kyiv. But he says he has never regretted his decision and has reunited with his grandfather, who lives in central Ukraine. Sarancha works at Save Ukraine, a charity helping others escape occupation, and is enrolled to study chemistry at a leading university in the capital.

   “This is perhaps the best choice I’ve made in my life,” he says in Ukrainian, a language he only recently learned to speak fluently. “If Luhansk were liberated, I would go there the very next day,” he says. “I was born and raised there, which is why it always draws me back.”

2. very based make ukraine nuclear again shirt

3. Tremendous courage demonstrated by these kids. Hopefully there are many more like them.

Comments are closed.