"
Shortly after turning 18 in February, Daniil Yermolenko fulfilled a long-held wish and signed a contract with Russia’s armed forces. A month later, he voted for the first time, casting a ballot in the presidential election for Vladimir Putin, who had already been in power for six years when Yermolenko was born in 2006.
By late March Yermolenko had completed a basic two-week military training, and he was sent to Berdychi in eastern Ukraine where Russian forces were engaged in a devastating assault as part of its spring offensive.
There, on 4 April, during a storming of a Ukrainian position, Yermolenko found himself separated from his unit, surrounded by intense enemy fire. Before losing contact, Yermolenko reportedly radioed his base: “This is it guys. I am doomed.”
Last week his family and friends gathered in a small town in central Russia to receive Yermolenko’s casket, which was draped in the Russian flag. A military orchestra presided over the ceremony where the casket was lowered into the ground.
Yermolenko is the only recorded Russian casualty so far to have been born in 2006, making him the youngest known soldier to have died since Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine more than two years ago."
"Thousands of young Russians, often referred to as “Generation P” for having lived only under Putin’s presidency, have died fighting in Ukraine. Mediazona, a Russian outlet that tracks war casualties using open sources, has identified nearly 5,000 soldiers under the age of 24 who have died in the war, including 1,400 under the age of 20. The real toll is likely to be much higher, the outlet says.
Russia portrays these fallen men, many of whom hail from the hinterlands, as heroes. And the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to make sure many more young people join the fighting as Putin seeks to re-engineer the country into a militarised society."
"Ever since Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian government has attempted to impose a state ideology on its young people, investing heavily in pro-government youth organisations. But for years these efforts seemed to be failing, with young Russians often at the forefront of pro-democracy protests and topping polls expressing anti-government sentiments.
The war in Ukraine, however, gave the Kremlin a renewed momentum to indoctrinate teenagers with Putin’s highly aggressive and anti-western version of patriotism.
“We are waging at least three wars,” said Sergei Novikov, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, in July 2023. “There is the war on the frontlines. There is the economic war. And the third war is an ideological war … a war for the minds of the youth.”
Russia has dramatically increased its spending on patriotic education and state-run militarised groups for children and teens, from £25m in 2021 to more than £382m in 2024. Since the onset of the conflict, public school textbooks have been rewritten to align with the Kremlin’s foreign policy, reflecting Russia’s interpretation of history that emphasises the need to reclaim “historical territories” lost to Ukraine."
