From Kherson orphanage to Russian propaganda stage: how a young man says he survived four years of occupation

KYIV, Ukraine — Denys Kostev remembers the exact moment his public life split in two. When Russian tanks rolled into his hometown of Kherson in the opening days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the then-18-year-old orphan was angry enough to film social media videos denouncing the invading forces. Within months, he says, he was on Russian television, reading from a script about the glories of the Russian army.

Now 22 and back in the Ukrainian capital, Kostev told Al Jazeera that he played the role of a poster child for wartime Russia not out of conviction but out of survival.

"It was useful to play this pro-Russian role," he said. "I wanted to live."

Kostev grew up in state care in Kherson, attending a theatre club at the orphanage where he lived after his mother's incarceration and death. By his own account, that performing background — sprightly, eloquent, photogenic — is precisely what made him useful to Russian media outlets. Refusing to be filmed, he says, carried the risk of physical assault or a prison sentence.

Surviving, however, came at a steeper price than a few staged videos. In the early phase of the occupation, Russian forces rounded up people suspected of pro-Ukrainian sympathies for interrogation, and Ukrainian rights groups have documented allegations that some detainees were abused. In late 2022, while studying at a trade school, Kostev and other young people from the orphanage were relocated to the Luchisty — roughly translated as "Full of Sunshine" — summer camp in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Life inside the camp was built around Russian ritual and Russian doctrine, he said. "Every morning, you wake up to the Russian anthem, and every Monday, there's a celebratory hoisting of the Russian flag," Kostev said. The children were also kept isolated from outside influences, he said, describing a form of information and social control aimed at the most vulnerable population imaginable.

"They're without parents, no one to explain what's right or wrong," he said. "At a certain point, you begin to repeat pro-Russian narratives."

Kostev said at least one teenager he encountered at the camp went on to enlist to fight against Kyiv. The summer camp's administration did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment. According to Kyiv, 84 Ukrainian orphans were held at the facility in 2023.

Kostev ultimately escaped Russia and is now preparing to fight for Ukraine, a reversal he describes with some bitterness rather than triumph. His account has become a test case for Ukrainian prosecutors and child-rights investigators trying to document what they say is a systematic campaign of deportation and "re-education."

Ukraine says more than 2,600 abducted children have been returned so far. Of those who left the Crimea camp, Ukrainian rights groups say they were among almost 4,000 children forcibly taken from orphanages in Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine. Kyiv makes a far larger claim — that Moscow has moved almost 20,000 Ukrainian minors into Russia in order to "brainwash" them over the course of the war.

The Kremlin has not disputed the re-education itself, but rejects the framing. Russian officials acknowledge that children are being re-educated while insisting that any children who were moved were rescued from combat zones. Some of those children, Ukrainian officials say, lost their parents in Russian shelling. Others, rights groups say, were enrolled in summer camps after pro-Moscow authorities persuaded their parents to sign them up for "safety reasons."

Ukraine further claims that some children have been taken from parents who refused to cooperate with Moscow-installed administrations in occupied territory. Russian forces and their Ukrainian collaborators have been accused by Ukrainian rights groups of interrogating and abusing such parents — including searching their bodies for pro-Kyiv tattoos and for bruises left by recoiling firearms, an indicator of having been shot at or beaten.

International rights organisations describe the alleged abduction and indoctrination of Ukrainian children as among the gravest crimes of the war, and the issue is increasingly the subject of legal proceedings. Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a rights watchdog, said the physical destruction of the conflict is visible to everyone, whereas the campaign to abduct and re-educate children "represents something more sinister altogether."

"There are deeply disturbing reports that Russia is carrying out military indoctrination with a view to use some of these children in the armed forces in their war against Ukraine," Dale said. "It's unacceptable."

Ukrainian officials say some 5,500 young people from Russia-occupied areas have been channelised into Yunarmiya — the "Young Army" — a movement that provides military training to minors. That pipeline, combined with the children seen on Russian television, has prompted domestic legal efforts to document what happened to them.

Svitlana Chunikhina, vice president of the Association of Political Psychologists of Ukraine, an organisation based in Kyiv, said the younger a child is when the process begins, the deeper the reshaping of their worldview. Children, she argued, have flexible psyches, adapt quickly to new environments and tend to trust adults — sometimes involuntarily, because they have no other choice — and take much of what they are told for granted.

That is why they are so difficult for Moscow's version of events to dislodge, she said. But she cautioned that the pattern is not destiny: "But it doesn't mean that the same will surely happen to all Ukrainian children."

Inside the Crimea camp, younger children were taught according to the Russian curriculum, and the education system did not appear to have offered a thorough, comprehensive programme for teenagers such as Kostev — a gap that may explain how unstructured, unsupervised time shaped him more than any formal lesson did.

Kostev's story lands amid a war that shows no signs of relenting. Russian strikes have continued to kill and injure people across Ukraine, and Moscow's foreign minister has said the war will continue "through to the end." For the young man who once denounced the occupiers from an orphanage in Kherson, the reckoning is personal as well as political: he says he wants to fight for the city he was born in, having already lost four years to the occupation of it.