At a recent United Nations General Assembly side event, Amb. (Ret.) Clint Williamson, Senior Director for International Justice Georgetown Law and the Lead Coordinator of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine (ACA), presented ICJI’s interim report on the indoctrination and militarization of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation. The report was prepared at the request of Bring Kids Back UA, an initiative of Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“Our overarching conclusion is that the documented campaign of indoctrination and militarization of Ukrainian children, implemented by Russian authorities, is in violation of various aspects of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and international criminal law,” Williamson said.

“It requires sustained investigation, documentation, accountability for perpetrators, and perhaps most importantly, support for the affected children and their families.”

Below is the Executive Summary of the report. To read the full report click here.

1. The Russian Federation’s policy to systematically indoctrinate and militarize Ukrainian children under its control presents a myriad of factual and legal issues that the International Criminal Justice Initiative (ICJI) of Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) has recently begun to examine. This interim report reflects our analysis up to July 2026 and will be followed by a final report when we complete our work. Four questions are reserved for the final report: the harm caused to affected children; the framework for assessing individual criminal responsibility, including categories of potentially responsible actors and applicable modes of liability; the application of specific offense provisions to particular practices; and the evidentiary standards required to establish the systematic character of the conduct. Each requires evidence that was not available at the time of this interim report and has been identified among the priorities for investigation.
2. Since 2014, Russian Federation authorities have pursued a coordinated policy in the occupied territories of Ukraine directed at erasing Ukrainian identity and replacing it with Russian. The policy accelerated after the full-scale invasion in February 2022. It operates through connected measures: forcible transfer and deportation, the imposition of Russian citizenship, the replacement of Ukrainian law and State institutions, the substitution of the school curriculum, and interference with family life and allegiance to Ukraine. Within that policy sit two distinct practices, indoctrination and militarization. This report is predominantly directed at militarization, and at those aspects of indoctrination that bear directly upon it.
3. Approximately 1.6 million children in the occupied territories are exposed to State-directed indoctrination and militarization, of whom at least 582,600 are of school age. More than 20,000 Ukrainian children have been deported or forcibly transferred to the Russian Federation and to the occupied territories. The practices encompass changes to curricula, citizenship, and identity; military-patriotic education and youth organizations; camps and military training; and pathways toward recruitment, enlistment, and conscription.
4. For purposes of this report, indoctrination means ideological and educational measures directed at shaping or reshaping children’s political, historical, cultural, or national beliefs and allegiance. Militarization means a deliberate process through which children are subjected to measures that normalize or valorize military service, or that build military-oriented attitudes, skills, institutional connections, or pathways toward future service. The two are distinct but overlapping. Neither is itself an international offense: the legal significance of each lies in its constituent acts and the rules those acts engage.
5. The assessment draws principally on international findings concerning systematic practices of indoctrination and militarization, Russian Federation legislative and regulatory instruments, and independent documentation, and is structured around the applicable legal requirements and elements. The report was developed by the ICJI at GULC, an implementing entity of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine, at the request of the Bring Kids Back UA initiative of the President of Ukraine. Its proposed measures are directed at supporting and continuing the efforts already undertaken by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine (OPG), as well as to support wider accountability, monitoring, and policy efforts.
6. The analysis focuses on measures imposed by an occupying power on children in occupied territory concerning nationality, indoctrination, and militarization, including their potential integration into armed forces or affiliated military or paramilitary structures. Each body of law addresses the conduct from a different perspective, and each requires different facts and legal elements for a violation to be established.
7. The law of occupation is the primary framework governing this conduct. It applies by reason of the occupation itself, it binds the occupying power irrespective of any change to the status of the territory, and its obligations are owed directly to the children concerned as protected persons. The Russian Federation’s effective control over occupied Ukrainian territory establishes it as an occupying power and triggers the corresponding obligations without conferring sovereignty. Purported annexation and the imposition of Russian citizenship do not displace those obligations or deprive protected persons of occupation-law safeguards. The documented practices breach, and in several respects continue to breach, the Russian Federation’s obligations toward Ukrainian children living under its occupation.
8. The practices engage specific prohibitions, not only the general obligations of an occupying power. Replacing the Ukrainian education system, restricting Ukrainian-language instruction, and substituting curricula directed at displacing Ukrainian identity engage the duty to respect the laws in force in occupied territory, and the duty to facilitate the proper working of institutions devoted to the care and education of children. Introducing military instruction into the school curriculum, and encouraging entry into the armed forces of the occupying power, engage the prohibition on pressure or propaganda aimed at securing voluntary enlistment. That prohibition applies whether or not enlistment follows. Enrolling children in State-directed youth movements and cadet structures engages the prohibition on enlisting children in formations or organizations subordinate to the occupying power. That prohibition admits of no exception.
9. Under international human rights law (IHRL), including child rights, legislative and administrative measures affecting children may themselves form the subject of legal assessment, and international courts and treaty bodies have already reached findings concerning the Russian Federation’s practices in occupied Ukrainian territory. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has called for an end to the politicization and militarization of schools. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has established administrative practices of suppressing Ukrainian-language teaching and of indoctrination in education. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the Russian Federation violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) through the manner in which it implemented Ukrainian-language school education in Crimea. These measures also engage the rights of children belonging to national and linguistic minorities, who are entitled to enjoy their own culture and to use their own language. Where the education system is replaced, instruction in the child’s own language restricted, and participation in the cultural life of the child’s own community displaced, those protections are engaged alongside the general provisions concerning education and identity.
10. Not every prohibition engaged by these practices is a war crime. Only two are: recruiting children into armed forces and compelling protected persons to serve in the forces of a hostile power. The second requires that militarization result in enlistment. Militarization does not, however, require subsequent military service. The measures described engage obligations by reason of their character and imposition, irrespective of whether enlistment follows. The remaining conduct is not reached by those provisions taken individually and falls to be assessed cumulatively. Although existing proceedings address the deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children, other documented conduct—education policies, youth organizations, military-patriotic programming, training, and citizenship and identity measures—remains largely outside existing criminal charges. These practices provide a substantial basis for serious and comprehensive investigation directed at establishing the elements of specific offenses, particularly as acts of persecution. Persecution on national grounds, as an underlying offense of crimes against humanity, provides the framework best able to capture the conduct cumulatively and in context, rather than as a series of isolated measures, and accordingly warrants particular investigative attention.
11. The documentation assembled to date was produced largely for monitoring and advocacy purposes, and without physical access to occupied territory. Converting material of that character into evidence capable of supporting criminal proceedings is a distinct exercise. It requires resources, access, and coordination commensurate with the scale of the conduct. This report identifies the elements of several international crimes that would need to be established with credible, reliable evidence.
12. The report’s principal contribution is operational. It treats the militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children as an interconnected sequence: education and identity are reshaped, children are integrated into institutions subordinate to the occupying authority, military participation is normalized, and pathways toward recruitment or conscription are created. Disaggregating that system into legally cognizable conduct identifies the applicable rules, the facts to be proved, the evidence required, and the institutions and actors responsible. The resulting framework can support investigation and prosecution, evidence preservation, monitoring and prevention, return and reintegration, and remedies for affected children.
13. No single authority can undertake what is required. The report accordingly calls for collective action by Ukrainian investigative and prosecutorial authorities, by States and international partners, by international accountability mechanisms, and by civil society and documenting organizations, whose work forms much of the record set out here. The recommendations set out in this report identify what each is placed to do.
14. The report finds that the documented practices breach the obligations of the Russian Federation under the law of occupation and under IHRL, and that international courts and treaty bodies have already made findings to that effect in respect of education, language, identity, and the transfer of children. It finds that the same conduct provides a substantial basis for investigation directed at establishing the elements of international crimes, and that persecution on national grounds is the characterization best suited to that conduct. It finds that the evidence presently available was assembled for monitoring and advocacy rather than for adjudication, and that what is required is not further legal analysis but documentation and investigation directed at the elements identified in this report.