Yale University researchers wrote a report about 210 locations (universities, camps, recreation centers and similar facilities) in Russia and Ukrainian territories it occupies, where Ukrainian children are brought for ideological re-education. The authors of the study spent three years gathering information from open sources — media outlets and social networks. Discussing this report on Sept. 30, 2025, on SB TV, SB. Belarus Segodnya reporter Liudmila Hladkaya called it a "new, in quotes, investigation, once again, about the abduction of Ukrainian children":
"Do you see the number 339? No, it's 35,000. That's what a Yale lab states in their latest report. It describes an entire network for re-educating and militarizing children."
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova also noticed this same figure in the Yale report.
"From what I saw, this report mentions 35,000 Ukrainian children that Russia allegedly abducted. (...) These are fake fabrications," she said.
The 339 children mentioned by Hladkaya is the number from a list that the Ukrainian side handed over to Russia in the summer of 2025 during negotiations in Istanbul. Russian representatives then claimed that many of the children on it had either already reached adulthood or had never been in Russia.
There is not a word about 35,000 children in the Yale researchers' report. It does not mention any number at all. There is only a phrase stating that the identified network of facilities is capable of housing tens of thousands of children from Ukraine. The report's authors also noted that they do not know how many children are currently at these facilities.
Yale project director Nathaniel Raymond mentioned in an interview with Deutsche Welle that in their work, the team relied on the number of missing children — 35,000. However, this is an unofficial estimate for internal use.
Incorrect data about the number of children is not Liudmila Hladkaya's only complaint against the Yale researchers. She accused the report's authors of not naming the facilities where Ukrainian children are being ideologically indoctrinated, only their number:
"The report talks about at least 210 facilities in Russia where Ukrainian children are allegedly subjected to forced re-education, undergo military training, and are practically tortured there. What are these 210 facilities? Perhaps they should be named? Perhaps the report's authors would like to visit them first?"
The report's authors listed the names and locations of all 210 sites. The WTF team randomly selected one — number 209 — Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky, and verified whether publicly available information indeed exists about accommodating children from occupied territories there and their re-education. Media outlets reported that schoolchildren from the so-called Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic come to Yaroslavl as part of the federal project University Sessions. The Russian Ministry of Education website does not hide that this project is aimed at forming Russian identity.
BIC reported on how Belarusian children are subjected to the same ideological indoctrination in the investigation The Young Guard. How teenagers in Belarus are being groomed for a military future disguised as patriotic education.
