Voin: The Architecture of Child Soldier Training in Russian-occupied Ukrainian Territories

Key Findings

1. Context and Origins

Following the limited success of Yunarmiya - which primarily performed socio-propaganda functions but failed to deliver systematic military formation - Russia pivoted after 2022 to a new model: systemic, integrated, and explicitly military in orientation. Yunarmiya’s structural weakness was that its public positioning as a ‘youth movement’ constrained the open integration of military practices.

Russia’s response was a two-track architecture. The first track established ‘Movement of the First’ (Dvizhenie Pervykh) as the political base: a children’s organisation framed as a loyalty formation mechanism for the regime. Its explicit political character, however, prevented it from absorbing fully militarised content. The second track - Voin - was designed to fill this gap.⁶

2. Voin: Programme Structure

2.1 Founding and Legal Basis

Voin was established in 2022 on the initiative of Vladimir Putin and senior Kremlin officials⁴ as an organisation with a dual focus on military-sports training and patriotic education. Its defining characteristics distinguish it from prior youth programmes:

• Funding: Exclusively from the Russian federal budget (unlike Yunarmiya, which relied on mixed and regional funding)
• Participants: Children and teenagers who are Russian Federation citizens (applied coercively to occupied Ukrainian populations through forced passportisation)
• Language of instruction: Russian only
• Geographic scope: Russian Federation and temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine
• Organisational character: Military-sports and patriotic education, explicitly not framed as a political movement

2.2 Core Programme Areas

Voin operates across two primary programme pillars:

• Military-Sports Preparation: Structured training, exercise regimes, and instruction in the basics of combat operations. This includes weapons handling, tactical movement, and physical conditioning designed to simulate military readiness.
• Summer Camps: children from occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are taken to the Avangard camp in Volgograd, and to 21-day ‘Time of Heroes’ camps, combining ideological indoctrination with field training and combat simulation.⁵ Sergei Kiriyenko oversaw the opening of the Berdyansk branch.¹ These camps compress the full militarisation cycle into immersive environments away from family.

3. Territorial Implementation in Occupied Ukraine

3.1 Social Map of Presence: Targeting Trauma

Analysis of Voin’s regional distribution across the Russian Federation reveals a deliberate placement logic: centres are concentrated in regions with the highest mobilisation rates, the greatest number of war deaths, and the lowest social protection infrastructure. This is not incidental.⁷ The Centre for the Study of Occupation’s assessment (April 2025) concludes:

“Russia deliberately uses the trauma of loss as an instrument of motivation for children - through revenge, hatred, and ideological radicalisation.”

In occupied Ukrainian territories, this logic is compounded: children have experienced first-hand violence, displacement, and the loss of family members. Voin is positioned to capture this trauma and redirect it toward loyalty to and participation in the occupation state.

3.2 Zaporizhzhia Oblast: The Testing Ground

Occupied Zaporizhzhia has been identified as Russia’s primary testing ground for the full multi-level youth militarisation cycle. The architecture here is the most fully developed:

• Voin operates alongside ‘Movement of the First’ workshops (confirmed active in all municipalities by the regional coordinator⁷)
• Zarnitsa 2.0 military-patriotic games planned for 2,000+ participants
• Three mandatory ideological disciplines introduced in higher education: ‘Philosophy,’ ‘History of Russia,’ and ‘Foundations of Russian Statehood’
• Direct military recruitment on university campuses: male students at Melitopol University gathered repeatedly for sessions on drone operation, front-line conditions, and financial incentives for military service
• Joint anti-terror exercises between Melitopol State University and Rosgvardia - normalising security force presence in academic environments
• FSIN (penitentiary service) internship programmes for university students, integrating the carceral system into professional formation⁷
• UAV/military recruitment framing explicitly targeting unemployed youth as a primary vector

3.3 Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast

Mariupol represents the most advanced implementation of the full institutionalised child militarisation architecture in occupied Ukraine, combining the Voin programme with a broader layered youth organisation infrastructure:

• Voin launched in Mariupol in spring 2025, with simultaneous construction of a military training camp in the Left Bank district - planned to be the largest Voin facility in all Russian-controlled territories outside Crimea⁷
• The former children’s camp ‘Orlyonok’ site has been designated for development as a combined ‘Patriot’ park and Voin military-sports training complex. Planned capacity: 300 children simultaneously. Infrastructure: tactical training house, UAV training area, shooting gallery, stadium, sports halls, residential accommodation, training helicopter landing site, and field medicine training facilities⁷
• Yunarmiya: active since May 9, 2022 (first unit established during active fighting at Azovstal); 200+ members by May 2025; Pushilin decree (11 May 2025) mandating 100% enrolment in all Donetsk schools⁷
• Additional organisations active in parallel: Orlyata Rossii (preschool pipeline), MHER/Moloda Hvardiya (United Russia Youth), Dvizhenie Pervykh, Komsomol (revived August 2023 at Azov State Technical University)
• Mariupol municipal budget (amended February 2026): Education = 58% of total expenditure (RUB 3.98 billion of RUB 6.91 billion total). Social policy receives less than 1%. This budget architecture confirms that institutional integration - not humanitarian provision - is the state’s priority
• From the 2025–2026 academic year, all schools in occupied Mariupol are for the first time fully integrated into the Russian education system⁷

3.4 Luhansk Oblast

Luhansk sees the Voin architecture operating in coordination with a broader suite of militarised education mechanisms:

• Cadet corps and Cossack units active across municipalities, providing a parallel military socialisation track to formal schooling
• Russian identity formation programmes extended to preschool level
• Yunarmiya and ‘Eaglets of Russia’ (Orlyata Rossii) operating in schools
• ‘Sugar-coated propaganda’ documented on social media, including Max Messenger coerced adoption in schools and institutions⁷
• Ukrainian language and literature removed from curricula from September 2025⁷

3.5 Kherson Oblast

Occupied Kherson has seen the institutional infrastructure for militarised youth programming constructed from late 2024–2025:

• From the new academic year: mandatory ‘Advisor on Education’ position introduced in all schools (corresponding to the RF post responsible for systematic military-patriotic education), announced by occupation governor Saldo on 10 July 2025⁷
• DOSAAF (Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army and Fleet) regional branch activated: plans for multifunctional patriotic education centres in major cities, implemented using confiscated property of the Ukrainian Defence Society (TSOAU)⁷
• Rosgvardia running ‘lessons of courage’ at the Kherson State Pedagogical University and acting as judge-instructors at military-sports events for school pupils⁷
• Universities mobilised for SVO support: ‘Universities for the Front!’ campaign recorded at Kherson Pedagogical University (production of trench candles for Russian forces)⁷

4. The Sequential Control Architecture

March 2026 data from Mariupol⁷ reveals the full logic of Russia’s approach: not individual programmes, but a deliberate sequential pathway designed to capture children across every developmental stage and channel them into the Russian state apparatus:

The result is that control over self-identification is exercised not through isolated propaganda events but through the gradual replacement of life trajectories from kindergarten to professional employment by Russian institutions. Voin is the most operationally visible element of this architecture, but it functions as one node in a deliberately designed continuum.

5. Scale and Trajectory

Voin has operated in the occupied territories since 2023, where it trained around 17,000 young people that year.¹ It operates across 17 Russian regions and four occupied territories, through around 21 branches, and is planned to expand to every region of Russia by 2030.² It is funded directly from the Russian federal budget, with over 15 billion rubles (around $201 million) allocated.³ The total number of children who have passed through the programme is not publicly known.²

• Mariupol Yunarmiya alone: 200+ members by May 2025; Pushilin decree targets 100% school enrolment
• Child deportation and re-education: A parallel track documents 255 cases of Ukrainian child deportation to Russia involving 11,366 individuals (DOC-283),⁷ with deportation types including ‘health camps,’ ‘foster care,’ and military-patriotic programmes

6. Analytical Assessment

Voin represents a qualitative shift in Russia’s approach to occupied territories that has not been fully captured in existing analytical frameworks. Three assessments are offered:

6.1 From Propaganda to Formation

Earlier programmes - Yunarmiya, Dvizhenie Pervykh - were primarily propagandistic: they staged events, created visible loyalty performances, and provided social incentives. Voin is qualitatively different. It is a formation programme: it produces trained individuals with military skills, physical conditioning, weapons familiarity, and ideological preparation for combat. The distinction matters for legal, policy, and resistance frameworks alike.

6.2 Occupied Territory as Laboratory

The concentration of Voin’s most advanced infrastructure - the Orlyonok complex, Zaporizhzhia’s multi-level cycle, Mariupol’s budget reorientation - in occupied Ukrainian territory rather than Russia proper suggests that the occupied zones are functioning as laboratories for testing the programme’s full architecture before broader RF rollout. The populations are captive, resistance infrastructure is suppressed, and Ukrainian identity can be targeted directly.

6.3 Legal Implications

The mandatory militarisation of children who have been coercively assigned Russian citizenship through passportisation programmes - and who cannot legally refuse enrolment under the Pushilin decree - raises serious questions under international humanitarian law regarding the recruitment of children into armed forces structures, the destruction of civilian identity, and the systematic targeting of Ukrainian cultural identity as protected by the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute.