{"id":151,"date":"2026-06-01T22:55:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T22:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/151\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T22:55:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T22:55:15","slug":"russia-trains-kidnapped-ukrainian-children-to-fight-their-countrymen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/151\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia trains kidnapped Ukrainian children to fight their countrymen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russia is abducting Ukrainian children<\/a> and training them to fight against their countrymen, Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian president said that Kyiv had evidence that the Russians \u201cpush these [abducted] boys to the battlefield\u201d and that they were \u201ctaught to hate their native country, to hate native people\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cUkrainians, can you imagine, such young Ukrainians, young boys, come to the battlefield and kill Ukrainians,\u201d he said in an interview with CBS News aired on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Although it is the first time Mr Zelensky has publicly levelled the accusation against Moscow, research groups, NGOs and state bodies have previously documented both the militarisation of Ukrainian children and the conscription of Ukrainians by the Russian occupation.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian president revealed that the Kremlin had attempted to include abducted children in prisoner of war exchange lists, hoping to swap them for its captured soldiers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey proposed us to exchange children with soldiers,\u201d Mr Zelensky said. \u201cCan you imagine?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Difficult\u2019 to retrieve children<\/p>\n

Unlawful deportation, forcible transfer, \u201cre-education\u201d of civilians and hostage-taking are all classified as war crimes under international law.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian president said Kyiv had documented the abduction of at least 20,000 Ukrainian children<\/a> by Russia. The real number is believed to be far higher, possibly in the hundreds of thousands. Ukraine has brought back 2,200 of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see how Russians are ready to give us back these children,\u201d Mr Zelensky continued, describing the process of retrieving them as difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia is abducting Ukrainian children and training them to fight against their countrymen, Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[83,25,6,11,26,81],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-live-priority","tag-russia","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-standard","tag-ukraine","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}