Russia is recruiting teenagers in occupied Ukrainian territories into a media training programme that feeds directly into the propaganda infrastructure documented across the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, turning children into ground-level content producers for a machine built to erase Ukrainian identity.
The programme is called Yunkor, short for “Young Correspondents”. It operates under Yunarmia, the Russian Ministry of Defence-backed youth organisation founded in 2016 that now claims over two million members across Russia and the occupied Ukrainian territories. On the surface, Yunkor resembles a journalism club. Internal documents obtained by OCCRP tell a different story.
From Vyshyvanka to Yunarmia Beret
The trajectory of a girl named Kateryna from Henichesk, a small resort town on the Azov Sea that fell under Russian control in 2022, captures what the programme does to a teenager in occupied territory. In 2021, she recorded videos celebrating the Ukrainian language. By 2023, she was standing in formation at a Yunarmia initiation ceremony at her school. By 2025, she had received an 800,000-ruble grant, roughly $10,500, from a Russian youth agency to develop what official documents called “patriotic education” in the occupied regions. Over the following years, 44 videos by Kateryna were published on Yunarmia’s local Telegram channel. She covers patriotic events, interviews Russian soldiers, and advises viewers how to correctly wear the Yunarmia beret.
Her transformation was not spontaneous. Russian forces arrived at her school in early 2023 and held a presentation for students. The Yunarmia branch then organised a formal initiation ceremony on February 23 of that year, Defender of the Fatherland Day, a date chosen to frame the induction in military terms from the outset.
Her case is not exceptional. In Skadovsk, occupation authorities inducted fifth-graders, children aged ten and eleven, into Yunarmia at School No. 1 in December 2025. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the children recited an oath of allegiance to Russia and sang the Yunarmia anthem at the ceremony. In the Luhansk region, teenagers named Polina and Yelysey participate in military games, film videos comparing current events to World War II, and use language expressing hostility toward Ukraine. A teenager named Maryna from the Kherson region published violent anti-Ukrainian content online after a drone strike on a building in Khorly.
The Information Warrior Curriculum
What Yunkor teaches is not journalism. Ksenia Barladyan, head of the Yunarmia press service, tells teenagers in lectures that the internet is a battlefield and their work is a contribution to victory in the information war. The programme includes workshops, media production tasks, meetings with Russian military personnel, and trips to Moscow for annual forums where state television propagandists teach participants to portray Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a positive event.
A reporter from OCCRP logged into Yunkor’s online school platform under the credentials of a real participant and found training modules designed to produce content supporting Moscow’s narrative about the war. Participants are not trained as journalists. They are trained as what internal documents call “information warriors”.
In the summer of 2023, groups of teenagers from occupied territories attended a media forum in Moscow under the supervision of military figures, some of whom are suspected of committing war crimes. The 2024 forum cost 9 million rubles, roughly $119,000, approximately two-thirds of which went toward organising the Moscow event. Yunarmia requested 270 million rubles from Russia’s federal education budget that year, channelled through another Kremlin youth organisation called the Movement of the First. In 2025, Moscow funded Yunarmia with one billion rubles overall, primarily through Putin’s “Youth and Children” national project and the defence ministry.
The scale across occupied territories is documented. By 2024, Yunarmia had enrolled 44,600 minors in occupied Ukrainian regions, while the Movement of the First counted nearly 122,000. According to Ukraine’s Centre for National Resistance, as cited by OCCRP, over 5,500 Ukrainian children were Yunarmia members in 2025. Vladislav Golovin, head of Yunarmia’s General Staff and himself under EU sanctions for his role in the capture of Mariupol and the militarisation of children, reported to Putin in 2025 that 12,000 Yunarmia members had already taken part in the war against Ukraine.
The Missing Tier
This is where the Yunkor programme connects directly to the propaganda infrastructure Insight News Media has previously documented in occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Those investigations mapped a four-tier system operating in both regions: local occupation outlets establishing daily presence, federal media brands lending credibility, social media creating the illusion of grassroots consensus, and official government channels supplying the master narratives that all other tiers amplify. The question those investigations left open was where the grassroots content actually comes from. Yunkor is the answer.
The connection is not structural inference. It is documented in the same outlets.
Zonews.ru, the Zaporozhskoye Agentstvo Novostey identified in Insight’s Zaporizhzhia investigation as a Tier One occupation outlet, published a report in April 2026 announcing that youth from the Zaporizhzhia region had attended the all-Russian Yunkor media forum in Moscow. “Representatives of Yunarmia of the Zaporizhzhia region became participants of the all-Russian media forum Yunkor, which united Yunarmia members from 30 regions of the country,” the outlet reported.
- https://zonews.ru/news/molodezh-iz-zaporozhskoj-oblasti-prinjala-uchastie-v-mediaforume-junkor-v-moskve/
Bloknot-Zaporozhie, the tabloid-format outlet documented in the same investigation as part of the regional propaganda architecture, published a February 2026 article about a meeting between occupation governor Yevgeny Balitsky and local youth media activists. The article explicitly named participants as Yunkor members alongside students, SMM specialists, and photographers: “During the meeting with the governor, more than 20 students, schoolchildren, young correspondents (Yunkor), SMM specialists and photographers were able to communicate.”
- https://bloknot-zaporozhie.ru/news/zaporozhskogo-gubernatora-balitskogo-sfotografirov-1946574
The Telegram channels documented as Tier Three social media amplifiers in both investigations, among them “Berdyansk is ours”, “New Melitopol”, and “Official Berdyansk”, regularly publish images of pupils in Yunarmia uniform standing in formation, taking oaths, and singing the Russian anthem, according to EUobserver’s investigation. These channels serve as the distribution layer for content produced at ground level by Yunkor participants.
The circuit closes here. Official government channels produce the master narratives. Tier One outlets give them regional presence. Federal brands lend credibility. Social media creates the appearance of grassroots consensus. Yunkor-trained teenagers supply the content that makes the grassroots layer look genuine because, in a technical sense, it is: real teenagers, in real schools, producing real videos. The manipulation is in how they got there.
War Criminals as Role Models
The indoctrination extends beyond media training. In schools across the occupied Zaporizhzhia region, specifically in Melitopol, Berdiansk, and Prymorske, Russian authorities have distributed comic books portraying participants in the invasion of Ukraine as heroes, according to United24 Media and adviser to the mayor of Mariupol Petro Andriushchenko. The comics were produced by the Znanie Society, a Russian state-affiliated organisation. Over 720,000 copies have been printed across three collections since the invasion began, with classes for grades five through nine introduced to the graphic novels from February 2026 onwards. Yunarmia members often attend these classes in uniform.
The figures depicted include Ivan Boldyrev, whose 319th helicopter regiment is suspected of involvement in crimes against civilians in the Kyiv region and who Ukrainian authorities have listed in the “Book of Executioners”. Another is Colonel Zalibek Umaev, whose fellow soldiers report that after seven men died in an operation, he sent new recruits to complete the task and refused to recover the bodies of those killed. A third is Vladislav Golovin, the same Yunarmia General Staff head who reported to Putin on the number of members fighting in Ukraine and was presented to schoolchildren as a role model despite being under EU sanctions for his role in the capture of Mariupol and the involvement of children in militarised structures. Maxim Dreval, director of the Znanie Society, stated that through these comics, Russian schoolchildren “realise the true price of peace and responsibility for their country”.
A Violation Hiding in Plain Sight
Human rights experts are clear about the legal status of what Russia is doing. Onysiia Syniuk, head of the Analytical Department at the ZMINA Human Rights Centre, states, as cited by OCCRP, that introducing the Russian education system in occupied territory constitutes a breach of international law. Citing the International Red Cross, Syniuk says that “propaganda in occupied territory should be equated with coercion to enlist in the occupying power’s armed forces”, an activity prohibited under international law.
Ukrainian prosecutors have moved to act. In October 2025, seven individuals were suspected of militarising children in occupied territories through Yunarmia. According to Ukraine’s National Police, children from Donetsk and later from the occupied territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia “fell into the system”, where they received drill training, weapons handling, combat tactics, and ideological indoctrination aimed at fostering hostility toward Ukraine. Documented cases show that upon reaching adulthood, Yunarmia trainees have participated in hostilities against Ukraine.
A school director in occupied Zaporizhzhia who refused the Russian curriculum spent years under threats from Russian forces. They once drove him into the steppe and threatened to kill him, as EUobserver reported. His story is the counterweight to Kateryna’s: one person who understood what the system was and what refusing it would cost.
In June 2025, Russian authorities issued an order removing the Ukrainian language from all schools under Russian control. By the end of 2024, 1.6 million children were living under Russian occupation, nearly 600,000 of them of school age. The occupied Zaporizhzhia region alone counts 41,000 pupils. Kherson counts 20,000. The Kremlin spent 66 billion rubles on patriotic education in 2025, $787 million, a sum 20 billion rubles higher than the previous year. That budget covers textbooks, camps, youth festivals, and Yunkor, the programme that trains Ukrainian teenagers as information warriors and then deploys them inside the very machine built to make them forget they were ever anything else.
