Kremlin Expands Youth Indoctrination in Russia and Occupied Territories of Ukraine (Part One)

Executive Summary:

• Within the last two decades, patriotic education in Russia has become a well-functioning apparatus of indoctrination that combines schools, youth organizations, museums, religion, and digital platforms.
• Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, nationalistic education evolved into a vital pillar of governance, with schools, cultural institutions, and religious organizations leveraged to ensure ideological conformity and loyalty to the Kremlin.
• Since 2022, the Kremlin has invested billions of rubles into patriotic education and militarizing the youth, aiming to maintain both its war efforts in Ukraine and authoritarian control at home.

In 2025, the Russian government allocated 66 billion rubles ($787 million) to patriotic education, underlining its ambition to indoctrinate pro-regime youth capable of sustaining both the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime at home (Ukrinform, September 7). The patriotic education budget for 2025 is 20 billion rubles ($238 million) more than that of 2024, with budget lines including textbooks, camps, youth festivals, mobile cultural centers, and museum exhibitions across both Russia and the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine (RBC, October 9, 2023; Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, September 5).

Moscow’s current steps to systematically indoctrinate youth have their roots in Soviet times, when the regime used the Pioneers and Komsomol organizations to bolster the loyalty of millions of children to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (UC Santa Barbara, 2022). These organizations offered camps, after-school activities, and rituals that infused ideological elements into every aspect of youth culture during the Soviet era. During the 1990s, the Soviet regime’s demise led to the collapse of youth indoctrination structures, leaving a vacuum in state-dominated control over youth education and upbringing. Throughout Putin’s regime, however, the Russian state has gradually rebuilt its ideological grasp over the education of Russian youth (Groza, June 19, 2024).

The current model of the Kremlin’s nationalistic indoctrination relies on more than two decades of institutional experimentation. In the early 2000s, the Kremlin initiated the first “Programs of Patriotic Education of Citizens,” establishing a legal framework for incorporating patriotic values into schools and extracurricular activities (TASS, August 17, 2015). In 2005, the Kremlin supported the launch of youth organizations such as Nashi and the Young Guard of United Russia (Kommersant, June 4, 2021). These movements combined loyalty campaigns with youth activism, from street actions to forums such as Seliger, designed to channel discontent into regime-friendly projects. By the mid-2010s, following the annexation of Crimea and protests in Moscow, patriotic education shifted decisively toward militarization. In 2016, the creation of Yunarmia (Youth Army), a Ministry of Defense-backed organization, institutionalized this change, marking the Kremlin’s shift toward instilling military rather than simply patriotic discipline in children as young as eight years old (see EDM, November 9, 2016, January 6, 2021, March 25, 2024; TASS, February 22, 2018). Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 elevated the militarization of Russian youth to a new level. Nationalistic education evolved into a vital pillar of governance, with schools, cultural institutions, and religious organizations leveraged to ensure ideological conformity and loyalty to the Kremlin.

Russian schools serve as the central location of the Kremlin’s indoctrination efforts, with curricula continuously revised to impose loyalty, patriotism, and support for the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine (see EDM, September 8, 2024). In September 2025, Russian schools introduced a mandatory subject, “Spiritual and Moral Culture of Russia,” intended to instill values such as patriotism, faith, family, respect for the elderly, and historical memory (Russian Ministry of Education Order No. 467, June 18). The course comprises stories of Russian cultural and religious figures as well as “heroes of the special military operation (SVO),” highlighting the fusion of moral education with wartime propaganda and teaching that “defending the motherland” is a sacred duty. The course is an expansion of earlier measures, such as the April 2022 announcement that all Russian schools would begin each week by raising the Russian flag and singing the national anthem as of September 1, 2022 (TASS, April 19, 2022).

Since 2022, the Russian government has also required all schools to hold weekly classes titled “Conversations About Important Things.” These lessons are designed to instill “traditional values,” promote Russia’s civilizational mission, and justify the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine (Krim Realii, September 4). As of this year, they have become a permanent feature of the school week, mandatory but ungraded, widely regarded as an ideological ritual rather than academic learning (Novie Izvestiya, September 11).

The subject “Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland,” introduced by the Kremlin in 2023 and expanded nationwide in 2024, provides Russian high school students with basic military training, including instruction on weapons handling and the use of drones (The Insider, July 22). To staff the program, the Russian Education Ministry even created a center to retrain veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine as teachers (TASS, September 6, 2023). The Russian government also revised history curricula to portray the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine as a Western-orchestrated coup and Putin’s present-day war against Ukraine as a defensive struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Open Democracy, April 25, 2023). Russian schools currently host regular military-patriotic activities ranging from letter-writing campaigns for soldiers to sewing camouflage nets and preparing trench candles, further combining education with wartime propaganda (Al Jazeera, February 26).

The Kremlin is also extending indoctrination into early childhood. Starting in September 2025, the “Conversations About Important Things” classes will be piloted in kindergartens across 20 Russian regions, including Moscow and Russian-occupied territories in the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. These classes target children as young as three, introducing nationalistic and militaristic narratives under the guise of moral education (Meduza, August 24).

Moscow’s increase in funding for patriotic education and propaganda among youth demonstrates its willingness to ensure pro-Russian and loyal youth members who will sustain both the war against Ukraine and Russia’s authoritarian order once they reach adulthood. In turn, in occupied Ukrainian territories, the Kremlin imposes this system forcefully by erasing Ukrainian identity and militarizing Ukrainian children for Russia’s war efforts.