Ukrainian Children’s Transfer to North Korea Sparks International Outrage

In a stark escalation of an already controversial situation, a human rights campaigner has labeled the alleged transfer of two Ukrainian children to a North Korean camp as a “war crime,” claiming Moscow is exploiting minors for propaganda and to strengthen international alliances.

The case involves 12-year-old Misha from Russian-occupied Donetsk and 16-year-old Liza from Simferopol in Crimea, who were reportedly sent to the Songdowon International Children’s Camp near North Korea’s eastern port city of Wonsan. According to testimony delivered to a U.S. congressional subcommittee on December 3, these children are among more than 19,500 Ukrainian minors that Kyiv claims have been abducted from Russian-controlled territories.

Kateryna Rashevska, a legal expert at Ukraine’s Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR), who presented the testimony, told DW the children were later returned to Russian-occupied Ukraine. “Russia is essentially exploiting our Ukrainian children for its propaganda,” Rashevska explained. “They present them as some kind of ‘Russian ambassadors’ of child and youth diplomacy.”

The RCHR has documented 165 camps for children, primarily located in Russia and Belarus. However, this North Korean connection points to a deepening alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang that has flourished since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. This partnership has seen North Korea supplying munitions and troops for the Ukraine conflict, while Russia provides food, fuel, and military technology in return.

“They are using our children to build strategic partnerships with a country that the U.S. has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and that is, in fact, complicit in the crime of aggression against the homeland of these children, against Ukraine,” Rashevska added. “That is absolutely unacceptable.”

The Songdowon camp, established in 1960, was originally created to host children from Communist-bloc states. It offers recreational facilities including a water park, beach access, a football field, gymnasium, and aquarium. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, it primarily became a retreat for children of senior North Korean officials, though it has recently reopened to foreign children as relations between Moscow and Pyongyang have warmed.

Dan Pinkston, a professor of international relations at Troy University’s Seoul campus who visited the facility in 2013, described it as “a bit like a Boy Scout camp, but with the Kim family as the focus.”

“For North Korean kids, the camp is almost a rite of passage where they can do all sorts of recreational stuff but with heavy doses of propaganda and indoctrination,” Pinkston said. “There were posters, signs, and slogans all about the evils of imperialism.”

Pinkston believes this case may be a test to assess the effects of greater indoctrination linked to the sense that children were being “rewarded” for good behavior. “It’s all part of the ‘Russification’ of these children and I expect we could see more such trips in the future,” he said.

Andrei Lankov, a Russian professor at Seoul’s Kookmin University, took a more direct view, describing the visit as “a pretty shameless piece of manipulation.”

Rashevska emphasized the broader implications: “For Kim Jong Un’s regime, this is a soft, socially acceptable way to deepen the ‘strategic partnership’ with Russia through ‘children’s diplomacy.’ For Russia, it’s useful because the kids get to see a country where human rights and freedoms are even worse than in Russia itself: no internet, no mobile phones, no possibility of staying in touch afterwards.”

Last week, the UN General Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution calling for the “immediate and unconditional return” of Ukrainian children “forcibly transferred” to Russia. The resolution demands that Moscow cease “any further practice of forcible transfer, deportation, separation from families and legal guardians, change of personal status, including through citizenship, adoption or placement in foster families, and indoctrination of Ukrainian children.”

In response, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed these accusations as “totally groundless and misleading,” claiming that the transfers were “exclusively a matter of evacuating from combat zones minors whose lives were at risk.”

As this humanitarian crisis continues to unfold, Rashevska remains adamant about the need for greater international protection for young Ukrainians. “Even if only one child is affected. Even if only two children are affected. Because they are our children,” she said. “Children are not statistics. Children are not the tool to shock people. Children are our future. And that future was supposed to be ours, but it has been stolen from us. That’s worth saying out loud.”