A Russian state-funded program is systematically recruiting teenagers from occupied Ukrainian territories and training them to produce pro-Kremlin propaganda, according to documents and testimony gathered by investigators.
The program, called Young Correspondents, operates under the umbrella of Yunarmia, a militarized youth organization backed by Russia’s defense ministry. Its explicit mission is to train participants to produce content supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Reporters who completed the program’s video course and obtained hundreds of pages of internal documents found that participants learn how to conduct information warfare. From the very first lecture, trainees are told that the internet is a battlefield and that they must become cheerful infowarriors who contribute to victory through patriotic content creation.
The program brings teenagers from occupied regions to Moscow for media forums where they interact with Kremlin-aligned war correspondents and state media personalities. One forum in 2023 brought at least 18 youths from occupied Ukraine together with over a hundred Russian participants for a three-day agenda that included meeting frontline soldiers and attending lectures on social engineering.
Internal Yunarmia documents show about 140 active Young Correspondent members operated in occupied Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, spread across regions from Kherson to Donetsk. The program’s 2024 budget of 9 million rubles supported the journalism training, though this represents only a small fraction of the broader Yunarmia infrastructure, which received over 500 million rubles from the Russian government.
The training curriculum includes a heavy focus on war correspondents, who are presented as the bravest representatives of journalism. Participants are taught to cover events supporting what Russia officially calls its special military operation, a term mentioned at least 13 times throughout the course.
Human rights experts argue the program violates international law, which prohibits an occupying power from imposing its own educational curriculum. Propaganda in occupied territory, they note, can be equated with coercion to enlist in the occupying power’s armed forces, an activity prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.
The program has produced dramatic transformations in individual participants. One teenager from the occupied city of Henichesk who filmed a video celebrating the Ukrainian language in 2021 later received an 800,000-ruble grant from Russian authorities to develop patriotic education in occupied areas. Her journey from Ukrainian patriot to Kremlin propagandist illustrates the program’s impact on young minds living under occupation.