The Kremlin says that it is taking Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied territories for “rehabilitation”, although in fact this term, as well as similar terms such as “treatment” or “rest”, does not mean anything other than deportation.

According to the Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, the Russians took about 20 thousand children. Of them, 800 were returned to Ukraine. Children are taken directly to the territory of Russia or through Crimea or Belarus, where they supposedly “rest” in camps for several weeks beforehand. This practice has been going on since 2014, but it became widely known only after the cases of illegal transportation of Ukrainian children and adolescents by Russia increased sharply in 2022.

On June 24, 2024, EU countries approved another package of sanctions against the Russian Federation. In particular, it introduced sanctions against the International Children's Center Artek, which organizes camps for children from Ukraine, including in illegally occupied territories. The restrictive measures also affected the Kadyrov Foundation, which is conducting a program of “re-education” of Ukrainian children and adolescents, and the Belarusian Republican Union of Youth, which is actively deporting Ukrainian children from illegally occupied territories. Some of their famous representatives were also blacklisted.

The First Deputy Chairman of the Kherson Regional Council, Yurii Sobolevskyi, shared how the process of deportation of Ukrainian children takes place under the pretext of “rehabilitation” at the Kherson region: “What is connected with the removal of children cannot be called evacuation or, as the occupiers call it, rehabilitation — it is deportation. These are elements of genocide, this is a completely war crime. They were able to take out a certain number of children in this way, and then prevented these children from returning to the Kherson region. Parents were also forced to leave for their children and stay in the territory of the Russian Federation”.

In Russia, Ukrainian children are placed in shelters and placed in foster families. And the second one then ends with the illegal adoption of children, which in the future makes their return to Ukraine practically impossible. Identification of Ukrainian children after adoption becomes impossible, as all the personal data of the child changes - starting with last name, first name and patronymic, date of birth, place of birth, etc.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian dictator Volodymyr Putin and the so-called Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Mariia Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of war crimes - deportation and displacement of the population, including children, from the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine.

Pro-Kremlin resources disseminate information that Ukrainian history textbooks say that Hitler liberated the Lviv region in 1941 and played one of the decisive roles in the liberation of Ukrainian lands from Soviet occupiers.

However, this information is not true. This was reported by the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security at the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. Firstly, Russian propagandists do not provide the author of the textbook and the year of publication. Secondly, the fake news contains a page from a textbook, the material of which does not correspond to the structure of the curriculum on the history of Ukraine or even the local course on the history of Lviv. Also, the history of the First World War on the territory of the Lviv region is presented sparingly and illiterately; most of the layer of the history of the First liberation movements is missing. And the interwar period is completely missing.

Accordingly, a “textbook” with such factual errors, and especially the glorification of Hitler, which in Ukraine falls under criminal liability for promoting Nazism, could not be allowed into the curriculum, the Center adds.

Propaganda resources are disseminating information that in connection with the active actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Belarusian border guards, as well as the Air Forces and air defense systems of Belarus and Russia, have been put on high alert. In asserting this, propagandists refer to the corresponding statement by the self-proclaimed President of Belarus Lukashenko.

In fact, this statement was made as part of an information operation about Ukraine’s alleged preparation of an attack on Belarus in several directions. The Belarusian dictator Lukashenko, together with his minions, continues to whip up hysteria around the fictitious “accumulation of Ukrainian troops in the border areas with Belarus”.

The Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security writes that in fact, Lukashenko, as an accomplice of Russian aggression, has been systematically threatening Ukraine since February 24, 2022, as well as other countries, in particular Poland and Lithuania. Such threats are intended to intimidate Belarus’ neighbors, as well as to draw part of the Ukrainian Defense Forces away from the front line to the Ukrainian-Belarusian border.

A network of Russian websites is spreading fake stories as part of an information operation increasingly targeting the US election, BBC reports. The Kremlin uses artificial intelligence to create thousands of news articles published on dozens of sites with names that should look American: Houston Post, Chicago Crier, Boston Times, DC Weekly and others. They also use names of newspapers that went out of business several years or decades ago, the BBC adds.

One of the key figures in this campaign is ex-Florida police officer John Mark Dugan, who moved to Moscow. According to the BBC, a wealth of digital evidence suggests links between Dugan and Russian fake websites - experts consulted by the investigation traced IP addresses and other digital information to websites operated by Dugan.

Fictional stories tracked by the BBC appear aimed at influencing American voters and sowing distrust ahead of the November election. Some of the fakes were completely ignored, but others were spread by influential individuals and members of the US Congress.

Russian propagandists can resort to large-scale disinformation campaigns before key events in a particular region of the world and set themselves the goal of influencing them. For example, there is evidence that the Kremlin has already interfered in the US presidential elections in both 2016 and 2020. We also recently wrote that Russia purposefully created fake news to influence the European Parliament elections that took place on June 6-9, 2024.