Satellite data sheds light on Russia's modern-day gulags for Ukrainian children

Globe and Mail

5 days ago

The maps and data tracking this activity are generated by Hala Systems, a Lisbon-based technology company that received a $2-million grant from Global Affairs Canada to provide high-tech assistance to Save Ukraine, a Ukrainian organization working with sources inside Russia and the occupied territories to help bring the children home.
They were shared exclusively with The Globe and Mail with the intent of raising awareness about what is widely considered to be an ongoing war crime.
The effort has also revealed what appears to be evidence of something even more sinister happening to a number of the missing and abducted children, some as young as eight. Hala has identified six of the facilities in the network as bases for Russia's 'Yunarmiya,' or Youth Army.
Analysts at Hala see proof that an unknown number of Ukrainian teenage boys are being given military training and instilled with anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda. The likely next step would see them assigned to Russia's regular armed forces to fight against their own country.
Mykola Kuleba, the co-founder and head of Save Ukraine, said the network of detention camps for Ukrainian children is reminiscent of the Soviet gulags. 'It's very similar – there's an Iron Curtain now over the occupied territories, and they can do what they want with the civilians, with the Ukrainians there, and the children,' he said in an interview. 'It's very similar to the gulags, but with different goals. In the gulags, they massively killed Ukrainians who did not obey the regime. Today, they massively indoctrinate Ukrainian children to turn them into Russian children.'
Unlawful conscription, such as forcing a civilian to fight against their own country, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as is the use of child soldiers.
Mozhem Obyasnit, a Russian news outlet funded by opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, reported last month that Yunarmiya's budget had been doubled to one billion rubles (about US$11-million) for 2025.
'We have seen some children as young as eight that are being sent into very structured military patriotic programs,' said Ashley Jordana, Hala's director of law, policy and human rights.
Much of the evidence, she said, was in the testimony of survivors who were rescued by Save Ukraine, as well as photographs of the youth camps that were published by Kremlin-controlled media outlets proudly reporting on the 'patriotic' re-education that Ukrainian children were receiving in the five regions of Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed.
'There's no shortage of testimony of children who are being indoctrinated and who are being forced to participate in the youth army,' Ms. Jordana said.
The full network of centres where Ukrainian children are being held sprawls from the occupied areas of southern and eastern Ukraine all the way to a facility in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, more than 3,300 kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
The map lays out where many of the 20,000 Ukrainian children who have been officially reported as missing – a number that both Hala and Save Ukraine view as the very minimum – have been taken since their homes fell under Russian occupation.
Mr. Kuleba said Hala's technology has helped his organization locate, establish communications with, and eventually rescue 129 children since the Canadian-funded project began last summer. The fate of many more Ukrainian children remains in jeopardy.
The number being trained for, or already serving in, the Russian army is difficult to estimate, Mr. Kuleba said, 'because this process is constant, of recruiting Ukrainians in occupied territories.' But all Ukrainians living in occupied areas had been forced to take Russian passports, making all males – even those younger than 18 – vulnerable to conscription.
Interviews with survivors, Mr. Kuleba said, revealed that 'all boys, especially those who live in occupied territories, clearly understand they could be taken to the Russian army any time.' Ukraine's children, he said, were being treated as 'spoils of war' by Mr. Putin, who used the deported children to both replenish the ranks of his military and to alleviate Russia's wider demographic crisis.
In some of the images produced by Hala Systems, little blue dots can be seen clustering in rooms inside the facilities, and sometimes moving in what appears to be military formation. Each blue dot represents the mobile phone of either a Ukrainian child or one of the Russians guarding them.
Ms. Jordana said it's Hala's assessment – based on a study of the movements of the mobile phones located with the Yunarmiya bases, as well as the testimonies of survivors – that the cadets are awakened at 6 a.m. each day. They receive a canteen breakfast of eggs and oatmeal before being sent on to classes that include firearms assembly and use, mine clearance and military tactics.
In the afternoons, the cadets are sometimes sent into the field to put their military skills to use in mock-combat situations. One satellite photograph shared with The Globe appears to show trenches dug in the yard of the Yunarmiya base in the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol.
'If states knew how much time and effort and resources Russia was putting into mobilizing and training a new generation of what are now children as eventual soldiers, I think that there would be a lot more concern,' Ms. Jordana said.
Ms. Jordana, a 40-year lawyer from Ancaster, Ont., who is now based in Barcelona, has served as both a legal advisor to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and as a member of the defence team at the trial of Jovica Stanisic, a key henchman of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. A UN tribunal found Mr. Stanisic guilty of war crimes, including the forced transfer of non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and sentenced him to 15 years in jail.
Now Ms. Jordana hopes she is helping build the case for a future trial of Mr. Putin and those who followed his orders.
'A lot of what we do now, it's not just useful for Save Ukraine,' she said. 'The information gets sent to the regional prosecutors, the Office of the Prosecutor General, to the ICC, and National Police of Ukraine.'
The maps of the facilities where Ukrainian children are being held were built by aggregating and analyzing what Hala calls 'open source' information, but require sophisticated technology to access and assemble.
The first and most important source of information are the testimonies provided by those children and teens who managed to escape with the help of Save Ukraine. That gave Hala and Save Ukraine a starting point, allowing them to zoom in on suspected locations using satellite cameras.
Many of the Ukrainian children and teens also appear to have mobile phones, a somewhat surprising development that allowed Hala and Save Ukraine to track groups – while also allowing the Russians to monitor the children's communications and social media postings, too.
Deeper profiles of the facilities, and the Russians working there – whom Ms. Jordana refers to as 'the perpetrators' – was done by tracking the movements of mobile phones belonging to those involved in the network.
'In a few cases, we followed the truck drivers. We knew they stopped at certain gas station locations,' she explained, referring to specific drivers that were involved in the movement of the Ukrainian children, as well as supplies for the network of Russian camps. 'Once you understand the mapping and the networks, you can apply change-detection capabilities so that you're actually alerted beforehand for activity that might be interesting for you.'
Additional information was gathered via social media – using bots developed by Hala Systems that combed the Telegram feeds of Ms. Lvova-Belova, among others, for tidbits about where the Russians were taking kidnapped Ukrainian children – as well as radio communications on unencrypted channels gathered via a network of sensors Hala has set up around Ukraine.
Eventually, Ms. Jordana said, Hala was gathering so much data that it was able to spot the creation of new youth camps before the Russians started moving children into them.
The work by Hala Systems has become even more important since March, when the U.S. government slashed most foreign aid programs. Among the cuts was funding to a research project by Yale University that built a database tracking the whereabouts some 35,000 Ukrainian children who had been illegally adopted by Russian families since the start of the war.
Mr. Kuleba said the Trump administration's decision to pull funding from the Yale project sent a 'dangerous message' that the U.S. government no longer cared about the fate of those children, or prosecuting those who had committed crimes against them.
Mr. Kuleba said Yale's database included more victims than the 20,000 figure used by the Ukrainian government because the latter figure covers only those who have been officially reported as missing by their families. Yale's list included orphans as well as children whose parents or guardians never reported their disappearances. (Ms. Jordana suggested some parents and guardians may be worried they could face punishment after intentionally sending children to schools and summer camps in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, believing the children would be safer on that side of the front line.)
Save Ukraine, Mr. Kuleba said, counts all 1.6 million Ukrainian children who now live in areas controlled by the Russian military as victims who should be given the chance to return to Ukraine.
Mr. Kuleba praised Canada for continuing to support the effort to bring Ukraine's children home.
'For us, it's very valuable to hear that Canada understands us. That they understand how every innocent child's life is valuable,' Mr. Kuleba said.
The year-long Canadian government grant that funded Hala's work with Save Ukraine expires in September.
It's not the first time Ottawa has turned to Hala Systems to help it advance a foreign policy aim. During Syria's 13-year civil war, Hala used open-source technology to develop an app called Sentry that would track the takeoffs and trajectory of Syrian government warplanes and then send a warning to the mobile phones of civilians living in their paths.
Sentry was partially developed with funding from Global Affairs Canada, though John Jaeger, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Hala Systems, said Canada gradually stepped back from its leading role in supporting the work as Syria became 'less popular' with not just Canada but donors around the world.
Still, Hala's successes in Syria laid the groundwork for the partnership in Ukraine. 'I'm sure it's helpful that we've passed audits and have put Canadian money to work responsibly and with impact,' Mr. Jaeger said.
For Ms. Jordana, coming from the slow-moving world of international justice, it was an awakening to see how technology could accelerate the process of gathering evidence. But she also had to bring her legal eye to the work, helping draft a 187-page manual for how to treat evidence, such as scratchy radio intercepts, so that it remains admissible in any future court proceeding.
'Ninety per cent of my job is translating what Hala is doing to individuals that can make use of it and apply it to their space,' she said. 'But tech companies also have a lot to learn from the human rights sector, who base their practices in harm mitigation and very transparent type of practices. So, the lessons sort of go both ways, I think.'
While Ms. Jordana said she hopes that the material she and her team are compiling will one day end up as part of war crimes trials related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that goal remains secondary to the immediate mission of trying to rescue the unknown number of children trapped in the 136 facilities that make up Mr. Putin's new gulag archipelago.
'How many Ukrainian children are still in Russia? Where are they? What happened to them? Are they safe? How many of them need to escape?' Mr. Kuleba said. 'This is a war for our children.'
After Russians forces invaded Kharkiv, Ksenia Koldin and her brother, Serhiy, ended up on opposite sides of a new Iron Curtain. In 2023, The Ukrainian teen told The Globe how she rescued Serhiy from a Russian summer camp, a new foster family and the indoctrination he faced. Mark MacKinnon shared her story with The Decibel. Subscribe for more episodes.
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