- Russia spent more than 50 billion rubles over the past five years building and running military-patriotic centers where schoolchildren undergo mandatory military training
- In these centers, teenagers from both Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories are being militarized
- By September 2025, there were 147 centers nationwide. The regions are responsible for creating and funding them, with money allocated in part directly from regional budgets.
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Describing the system as a “conveyor belt for preparing Russian teenagers for war,” an investigation by TVP World’s Russian-language sister channel Vot Tak reported that while the camps are officially voluntary, significant pressure is often applied to get children to attend.
One mother of a 10th-grade camp attendee told the outlet: “The teachers said you can’t refuse; you won’t pass the Life Safety test, and if you fail, you simply won’t be allowed into 11th grade.
“Those children who didn’t want to go were closely scrutinized and pressured,” the woman continued. “Parents were called in for a talk; the children were invited into a separate classroom and asked why they didn’t want to go and what their views were.”
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The camps offer five-day courses during which cadets, typically aged 16 or 17, are taught weapons skills, battlefield first aid, and how to operate in conditions of biological, chemical or radioactive contamination, Vot Tak reported.
The camps’ official goal is to help young people acquire the skills needed for “rapid adaptation upon conscription,” but they are also used to promote military service and encourage young people to join the armed forces.
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In addition to the Avangard centers, Russia is also rolling out a network of Voin (“Warrior”) centers, a parallel youth training initiative created on Putin’s orders shortly after Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
According to Vot Tak and official Russian materials, the Voin center network is already present in 21 regions of Russia, with plans approved by Putin to expand it to all federal regions. Vot Tak established that four of these “Warrior” centers are located in Russian‑occupied Ukrainian territory.
While there are no Avangard centers officially registered in Ukraine, Russia has actively pursued the militarization of Ukrainian youth in occupied areas through transfers to camps inside Russia and locally organized militaristic events, Vot Tak reported, citing a Ukrainian human rights lawyer.
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Ksenia Kornienko, a lawyer with the Ukrainian organization Regional Center for Human Rights, told Vot Tak that Ukrainian youth are either sent to centers in Russia or enrolled in other types of military‑style programs in the occupied territories.
These activities have been documented in Crimea since almost immediately after Moscow annexed the peninsula in 2014, Kornienko said, adding that military training camps are organized at individual schools in the regional capital, Sevastopol.
Young people are trained at these camps by Russian veterans of the war in Ukraine as well as by members of the Russian National Guard and officers from the Black Sea Higher Naval School, Vot Tak wrote.
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In the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Russian‑backed separatists declared as “people’s republics” in 2014, military training camps for schoolchildren have been integrated into the education system since the early years of the secession movement and intensified after 2022.
In the case of Ukrainian children, pressure is often overt, according to Kornienko, who considers these practices a human rights violation.
“We’ve documented cases where Russian military personnel have come to schools, forcing teachers to send some of their children to participate in these camps,” she said.
“They’ve come to people’s homes and told them that if they don’t send their children to the camp, they’ll be stripped of their parental rights or [the children will be] sent to a boarding school. This is how they’ve encouraged parents to sign documents,” the lawyer told Vot Tak.
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“This pressure indicates that a war crime has been committed—the deportation and forced displacement of children.”
Here is an alternative report by Medusa, citing Vot Tak: Report: Russia has spent billions building military-patriotic centers to train schoolchildren