In Murmansk, a port city inside the Arctic Circle, children of Russian soldiers once stood beside another group at a regional holiday celebration: boys and girls taken from Ukraine's occupied Prymorskyi district in Zaporizhzhia. They had been flown or bused thousands of miles from home, officially for "rehabilitation." Unofficially, researchers say, they had become instruments of war. Ukrainian authorities have verified 20,651 cases of children deported or forcibly displaced to Russia and Belarus since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, though Russian officials themselves have cited figures as high as 744,000.

As of September 2026, only 2,644 children have been returned. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in March 2023 for President Vladimir Putin and his children's commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, over their roles in the program. Researchers with the Where Are Our People? project, working alongside King's College London, say they have identified at least 47 Russian and Belarusian officials and executives involved in the deportations, most of whom remain outside the reach of Western sanctions.

By tracking regional government documents and the social media posts of Russian officials, researchers have found that the removals follow a consistent pattern. Children are taken from cities such as Melitopol and Mariupol under the pretext of "health holidays," then dispersed to facilities in Siberia, the Arctic and the Far East, where their identities are often obscured and some are placed with Russian foster families. Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab has mapped 210 such facilities, where children are reportedly subjected to re-education in Russian curricula and patriotic programming. For parents left behind, the price of staying in contact with their children is often cooperation with occupying authorities, researchers say.

The longer-term goal, they argue, is demographic rather than military: raising a generation in the occupied territories that no longer identifies as Ukrainian at all.