The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days.

We are told that Purdue Pharma, which long ago pleaded guilty to its crimes, this week finally had to “stand before a judge” and be criminally sentenced. The judge, who “at times appeared to be on the verge of tears” according to the Associated Press, said she found the company guilty of “a purposeful, intentional and sophisticated crime scheme.” Headlines and government press releases immediately trumpeted the impressive-sounding $5.5 billion penalty she signed off on. Families whose loved ones had become addicted to (and in some cases died from) doctor-prescribed opioids spoke for more than five hours about their suffering. The judge ordered the chairman of Purdue Pharma to apologize directly to those families for the “intentional and sophisticated crime scheme” that had created all of that addiction. He apologized obediently. With a sigh of contentment, the Justice Department announced Purdue had at last been held “accountable.” Everyone agreed the company would now be ceremonially destroyed, and never allowed to do business again.

And almost none of it was true.

Oh, the criminal conspiracy that intentionally got millions addicted, and raked in billions of dollars — that part was real. So was the suffering ordinary Americans testified to for many hours, and in fact I hesitate to criticize a process that might have unburdened a few people, might have given them relief to feel they’d been heard.

But the hard truth is that they weren’t heard. Sure, a lone judge listened to them, and might have cried a little bit, and promised to keep photos of their dead loved ones in her office for as long as she was a judge. But otherwise, no one relevant “stood before a judge” or apologized. No one paid any kind of a real penalty. The $5.5 billion in criminal fines is a wild, ongoing and shameless fabrication. The judge herself publicly lamented the ways in which justice had fallen short. And Purdue is not even really being “destroyed.”

In fact, neither the company Purdue Pharma nor the Sackler family that created it will even stop selling OxyContin.

Here’s a quick rundown of the rampant dishonesty of this moment.

“Purdue” did not stand before a judge for sentencing.

“Purdue Pharma” was the corporate address of a criminal conspiracy to trick doctors into a massive increase in opioid prescribing. That conspiracy itself was directed by a handful of human beings: Purdue executives and high-priced consultants, and also leading members of the fabulously wealthy Sackler family. Eventually, the 20-year run of doctor-prescribed opioid addiction they created had become so outrageous and painful that the company was on verge of being destroyed by lawsuits, and the human beings controlling the company possibly even jailed. At that point, those guilty humans — the Sacklers and their lieutenants — sucked billions of dollars out of the company and hid it abroad, declared the company bankrupt and then started negotiating.

The current Purdue Pharma chairman, Steve Miller, was brought in for the closing act. He’s a former automobile manufacturing executive who’s made a name for himself stepping in to crisis-manage dying companies. He was hired to shepherd Purdue through its multibillion-dollar bankruptcy.

So, he is just a person (one of many) paid fabulously by the Sacklers to clean up their mess.

Miller was paid to stand there Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey and let the families victimized by the Sacklers heap abuse on him, and to let the judge tell him how bad Purdue sucks, and to apologize on demand like a good dog. He did all of that.

But not one of the human beings involved in the conspiracy, no one guilty of the relevant crimes — crimes that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — was there. “Purdue Chairman Miller” had nothing to do with the crimes he apologized for. He was the equivalent of an actor in a play, put on to create the impression that someone is apologizing.

Even the judge knows everyone is getting away with murder

Family members addressing the court Tuesday asked the judge to reject this plea deal, which was hammered out between Purdue and the U.S. Justice Department back in 2020, in the final days of the first Trump administration. They said they wanted to see the human beings who orchestrated the conspiracy — a criminal conspiracy that, remember, killed hundreds of thousands of people — go to prison.

U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo could have told the family members that they were asking for something inappropriate. She did not.

“The inadequacy of what the law can offer today must be plainly stated,” she said, and: “It is not lost on me that those who started the epidemic will not serve a sentence.”

As reported by CNBC:

Arleo said she could not jail Purdue executives or company owners because the U.S. Department of Justice had not brought charges against them, only the company.

The judge said accepting the plea deal was the best outcome she could achieve, and that she hoped future cases would be handled differently, so that corporate wrongdoers do not get the message that they can “pay fines as the cost of doing business.”

The Sacklers long ago paid small fines to escape justice

More than five years ago, several Sackler family members paid a pathetic $225 million to the U.S. Justice Department as the cost of doing business. This was a personal fine they paid on their own behalf. It was pocket change, perhaps 1% of the billions they had earned pushing opioids across America. But it was enough to get the Justice Department to go away.

The Justice Department apparently didn’t interview a single Sackler before reaching this settlement decision.

“The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them,” wrote author Patrick Keefe in his indispensable book on that era, “Empire of Pain.” “A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice.”

That frustration could be heard back then between the lines of a defiant Justice Department press release: It stated that “years of hard work by the FBI” had found Purdue executives and the Sacklers guilty of “illegal and inexcusable activity.” And it added that, while the Justice Department was accepting a small donation of $225 million to look the other way, it reserved the right to reverse itself at any point and to bring criminal charges, including specifically against the Sacklers:

If “years of hard work by the FBI” had found “illegal and inexcusable activity” — why excuse it?

The Justice Department back then claimed Purdue Pharma itself would also be fined more than $8 billion (in both criminal and civil federal penalties), under a deal in which the company would plead guilty to criminal behavior in encouraging an epidemic of addiction for money. Again, not a single individual from Purdue’s C suite was named.

This week, the empty shell of “Purdue Pharma” was finally sentenced under that long-ago brokered plea deal, and “Purdue Chairman Steve Miller” stood there and “apologized,” and the U.S. Justice Department then crowed in a new press release about its successful work to “hold Purdue accountable.” Quote after self-congratulatory quote attributed to top Justice officials — from the attorney general to the heads of the FBI and the DEA — decried how “Purdue Pharma,” motivated by “greed,” had engaged in “reckless and unlawful conduct” that created a “plague that has ruined lives and destroyed families,” “a public health catastrophe,” “widespread devastation,” etc.

But the human beings who visited all of that horror on America weren’t there at the sentencing. They were off enjoying their lives and their wealth.

The Sacklers are still selling OxyContin

Their family empire includes U.K.-based Mundipharma, which earns far more than $1 billion a year selling OxyContin in China and other parts foreign.

Who knows, maybe someday Mundipharma will open a U.S. office, and start selling opioids to the American market. After all, Mundipharma isn’t guilty of anything — that was Purdue Pharma.

If Mundipharma did ever open a U.S. affiliate, I wonder what they’d call it.

Purdundipharma? Murdue?

The $5.5 billion fine, like the earlier $8 billion fine, is a fiction

The Justice Department press release claimed that Purdue Pharma had just been “ordered to pay criminal penalties of over $5 billion for its role in fueling the opioid epidemic.” Media also trumpeted this $5.5 billion penalty.

In reality, as previously reviewed, only about $275 million of that massive penalty is being collected by the U.S. government.

The remaining $5 billion and change?

It is getting vaguely folded into the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy. So, to recap:

1. The Sacklers (according to the U.S. Supreme Court) siphoned $11 billion out of Purdue in just its final years and then left its carcass behind in bankruptcy; and now, through a yearslong bankruptcy process, have agreed to return about $6.5 billion (over 15 years, mind you).
2. The Justice Department has over the years stated it was fining Purdue not only the $5.5 billion in criminal penalties imposed in Tuesday’s sentence, but also $2.8 billion in civil penalties (over false medical billing to Medicare, Medicaid and other government health insurers), for a total of more than $8 billion. But once Justice had enjoyed the sugar high of headlines about multibillion-dollar penalties, it dropped those claims and said that, oh, Purdue was paying enough already through the bankruptcy process.
3. In other words, Justice could have made up any number for its press releases and soaked up our applause. But it’s only collecting about $275 million from Purdue and, of course, the $225 million-to-leave-us-alone money from the Sacklers.

Lawyers have billed more than $1 billion so far

A billion dollars for lawyers — paid up front! — has been billed, so far, on Purdue’s $7.4 billion bankruptcy settlement.

The lawyers have already collected more from the Purdue bankruptcy than all of the 140,000-odd individual victims who have filed claims ever will.

Consider that the entire payout to a given individual harmed by Purdue opioids is expected to run between $8,000 and $16,000 — before legal fees those individuals might accrue, since they each have to pay their own lawyers. Meanwhile, other lawyers have been billing the bankruptcy process $3,000 an hour. A single lawyer has been able to wrest more from Purdue’s carcass in a single day than the amount granted to any individual as total compensation for a life and family destroyed.

Purdue is not going away, it’s getting a makeover

On May 1, Purdue will “transfer its assets” to a new company, Knoa Pharma LLC.

There will be new ownership, and a court-mandated mission of public service. It sounds great, doesn’t it?

Here are some final fun facts:

1. Knoa Pharma, like Purdue now, will continue to sell OxyContin and other opioids, at least for a time, probably out of the same office spaces. Why is it doing that? Because it has to provide value to the creditors of the bankruptcy process.
2. Knoa’s main mission will be to manufacture and sell medications seen as treatments for opioid addiction. Which means that, when the state governments across America go to spend the billions of dollars allocated to them by the Purdue bankruptcy and other opioid legal settlements, they will likely be giving that money to Purdue Knoa Pharma.
3. Knoa Pharma (and other pharmaceutical companies) will likely spend money clawed back from Purdue and the Sacklers on the project of educating all of us about how the only responsible treatment for opioid addiction is to be started on lifelong opioid maintenance therapy. So, we will all have to stomach watching Big Pharma continue to monetize addiction into a tidy and reliable business line, and to do so with sanctimony.

The post The ‘Criminal Sentencing’ of Purdue Was a Cruel Fiction appeared first on Truthdig.

Nepal’s Revenue Investigation Department filed money laundering charges Wednesday against the former executive director of the state-owned Security Printing Centre and his wife, seeking to recover more than 689 million Nepalese rupees (about $4.5 million).

Authorities filed the charge sheet at the Kathmandu District Court against Bikal Paudel, 43, and Alina Basnet. The department alleges the couple misappropriated more than 626 million rupees (about $4.1 million) in foreign exchange transactions, which triggered a separate court case in October 2024.

Prosecutors are seeking a claim of about 611 million rupees (about $4 million) from Paudel and nearly 78 million rupees (about $514,800) from Basnet. Under Nepalese law, authorities are demanding the confiscation of their allegedly illicit assets, proportional prison sentences and fines double the claimed amounts.

The Security Printing Centre produces sensitive government documents, including currency, passports and official certificates.

Paudel is already serving a prison sentence in Kathmandu following a previous corruption conviction. Neither he nor his wife could immediately be reached for comment.

OCCRP has condemned the seizure by Fiji police of a phone belonging to one of its affiliated journalists,  after she made a social media post about alleged corruption in the force.

Meri Radinibaravi, an investigative reporting fellow with OCCRP, was called into the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in the country’s capital shortly after posting — and quickly deleting — the Facebook comment.

The incident occurred during a tense period for the Pacific island nation of nearly one million people. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is currently weighing whether to declare a national state of emergency in response to a surge in drug trafficking and organized crime.

At the same time, the authorities have launched a high-profile murder investigation into the death of a drug suspect who died while in military custody. Radinibaravi, who joined OCCRP last year, has been closely covering that inquiry and investigating the broader infiltration of organized crime into Fiji’s police and military ranks.

“Calling a journalist into a police station and forcing her to surrender her phone is an unacceptable attack on press freedom and independent media in Fiji,” Miranda Patrucic, the editor in chief of OCCRP, said in a statement. “It is designed to harass the journalist and is a brazen attempt to target her sources.”

“We demand the immediate return of her equipment and a guarantee that no data has been accessed or compromised,” Patrucic added.

The Fiji Police Force and its commissioner, Rusiate Tudravu, did not respond to questions sent by OCCRP.

Radinibaravi said police contacted her on Wednesday afternoon, informing her that they needed to question her regarding her Facebook post, which referenced allegations of corruption during the tenure of Sitiveni Qiliho, a former police commissioner who was later convicted and imprisoned for interfering in a criminal investigation.

Radinibaravi said police told her they would send a squad car to her home to pick her up— a suggestion she found intimidating . She instead offered to go to the CID office on her own.

At the headquarters, a detective from the cybercrime unit questioned Radinibaravi and asked her to type up a formal statement. In it, she wrote that she had made the post without malicious intent and had subsequently deleted it.

After she signed the statement, the detective informed Radinibaravi that the police needed to confiscate her phone for a digital forensic analysis. Radinibaravi initially refused but said she eventually felt forced to surrender the device. She said she believed the pressure from police may have been connected to her ongoing reporting on sensitive corruption allegations within the department.

Fiji has a fraught history regarding press freedom, marked by periods of strict censorship, particularly during past states of emergency and following military coups.

However, the media landscape had recently shown signs of opening up. In 2023, Rabuka — who himself cracked down on the press after leading a military coup in the late 1980s — championed the repeal of a draconian media law that had long threatened journalists with hefty fines or imprisonment for criticizing the government.

The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Governor of Sinaloa, Mexico, Ruben Rocha Moya, and nine other high-ranking Mexican officials on drug trafficking and weapons charges this week, alleging they formed a political and police protection network for a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.

The indictment by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York alleges that the governor and the nine other current and former government or law enforcement officials in Sinaloa shielded “Los Chapitos,” a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, from investigation, arrest and prosecution. “In exchange, the defendants have collectively received millions of dollars in drug money from the Cartel,” said the indictment, which has been obtained by OCCRP.

After the indictment was announced in a press release Wednesday, Moya used social media to deny the charges. That same day, the Mexican foreign ministry and attorney general’s office issued statements saying a U.S. request for his provisional arrest lacked sufficient evidence.

“I categorically and absolutely reject the accusations made against me by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, as they lack any truth or foundation. And this will be demonstrated conclusively at the appropriate time,” he wrote on X.

In a press statement, the Attorney General’s Office of Mexico said it had received a U.S. government request for provisional arrest for extradition of Moya and the 9 other officials but it was “not accompanied by sufficient evidentiary elements that provide conclusive evidence regarding the narrated facts.”

It added that it “will initiate an investigation to gather all the necessary information to determine if there is evidence to establish the probability that the accusation made by the U.S. authorities has the legal basis to request arrest warrants.”

Javier Oliva Posada, a national security expert, told OCCRP that according to the extradition treaty between the two countries, the U.S. government has 60 days to present Mexico with its evidence against the governor of Sinaloa.

“So far, it’s just an accusation. The important question here will be: How substantial is the accusation? How well-founded is it?” Posada said.

The U.S. indictment alleges the 10 officials engaged in a  partnership with the cartel facilitated the importation of fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin into the U.S., and in the case of a municipal official from Culiacán, the kidnapping and murder of a confidential U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration source and his family members.

The other charges against the ten men are related to the possession of machine guns and destructive devices, as well as conspiracy to possess these weapons. The indictment describes hitmen armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, AK-47s, AR-15s, and other weapons, in addition to meetings protected by armed men.

Investigations have been previously launched against former Mexican governors for alleged connections to organized crime after they had left office, but this is the first time a sitting governor has been indicted. 

Posada and other experts interviewed by OCCRP said the indictment represents a significant challenge for President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government amid the review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade pact that is up for renewal in July.

David Saucedo, a security consultant, asserts that this situation is unprecedented but was expected, as the U.S. had warned Sheinbaum that it would pursue alleged “narco-politicians.”

“So, what comes next? Well, Governor Rocha Moya would have to lose his immunity. He cannot be subject to any criminal proceedings because he is the governor,” Saucedo said.

Henichesk, a small resort town on the Azov Sea, was one of the first Ukrainian population centers to fall to the Russians.

As tank columns streamed north from occupied Crimea on the very first days of the February 2022 invasion, some 19,000 people suddenly found themselves living under Russian occupation.

For one local teenager, it was the beginning of a life-changing personal reorientation.

Late one night in the summer of 2023, five teenagers from Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region boarded a train in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. They were on the way to Moscow.

When Russia launched its war on Ukraine in 2014, they were still young children. Now they were future war correspondents, learning to relay Kremlin propaganda on Russian military operations.

The five are accompanied by 48-year-old Alexey Linev. In Russia, he’s a sergeant who leads a grenade-launcher unit; in Ukraine he’s suspected of war crimes over his role in the militarization of children in occupied territory. Less than a year later, Russian media would report that he had been killed in action.

Meanwhile, three other groups of teenagers and accompanying adults from other  occupied Ukrainian regions are already en route to the Russian capital. Their destination is the first national “Young Correspondent” media forum.

From July 28 to August 1, 2023, at least 18 youths from occupied Ukraine joined over a hundred Russian participants to learn how to convey the “truth” about the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Their three-day agenda included meeting with soldiers from the front lines, hearing a lecture on “social engineering” in the “era of new media,” and other sessions.

The media forum is just one highlight of the “Young Correspondents” program. In some ways, the initiative — referred to in Russian by the abbreviation “Yunkor” — resembles a journalism club: Participants attend online training, create news reports, record interviews, and attend master classes with experienced journalists. 

But there’s no mistaking Yunkor’s mission. It is organized under the auspices of “Yunarmia” (“Young Army”), a militarized youth organization supported by Russia’s defense ministry and funded by state money. And among its explicit goals is for participants to produce content in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Since it was founded in 2017, the Yunkor program has grown to about 5,000 participants, according to the Yunarmia website.

Internal Yunarmia documents obtained by reporters show about 140 active Yunkor members in occupied Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, ranging from six in the Kherson region to 60 in Donetsk.

They also show that 9 million rubles ($119,000) were spent on Yunkor in 2024, about two-thirds of which went toward organizing that year’s second media forum in Moscow, and the rest toward local expenses. 

But this modest sum belies the larger Yunarmia infrastructure — like the dozens of local “Yunarmia Houses” built across Russia and occupied Ukraine — that the journalism program relies on.

According to the internal documents, Yunarmia requested 200 million rubles ($2.4 million) from the defense ministry in 2023 and received over 500 million rubles ($6 million) from the government in total. The following year, it requested a subsidy of 270 million rubles ($3 million) from the Russian budget’s education program, channeled through another Kremlin-loyal youth organization called “The Movement of the First.” 

To find out exactly what the Yunkor program is instilling in the minds of Ukrainian teenagers, a reporter logged into the online school’s web platform under the credentials of a real participant.

‘Victory in the Information War’

From the very first lecture, participants are left in no doubt as to the militarized nature of their training. 

“As a military-patriotic movement, we focus on the work of the bravest, and perhaps the wisest, representatives of journalism — war correspondents,” says Ksenia Barladyan, head of the Yunarmia press service, in the very first minute of her introductory lecture. The Russian word for war correspondent, “voenkor,” is repeated at least 20 times throughout the 26 lectures that form the curriculum.

As they progress through thematic courses like “Journalism,” “Social Media,” and “Information Security,” participants learn the basics of the media industry, exploring career paths and journalistic techniques.

But they are also taught that they must become cheerful infowarriors.

“Our internet space is truly a battlefield right now,” Barladyan says. “I really want you to create positive, correct, good, useful, intelligent, and patriotic content … [If you] use social media tools correctly, this will be your contribution to victory in the information war.”

The main topic of the day is clear: “Don’t forget to cover events aimed at supporting the special military operation,” Barladyan says. This propagandistic label — the official Russian term for its war on Ukraine — is mentioned at least 13 times throughout the course.

The young participants learn from real media figures. The lecturers include Kremlin-aligned war correspondents and media managers from Russia’s state media ecosystem, one of whom touts a decoration from Putin for her coverage.

Among the more prominent is Regina Orekhova, a TV presenter and filmmaker with over 15 years’ experience in Russian state media. She has filmed at least two documentaries from Ukraine’s occupied territories, glorifying the Russian invasion and portraying it as a long-awaited blessing for the local population.

She focuses on one of these films — “Who, If Not Me?” — in her lecture on “the role of war correspondents in covering military history.” The documentary tells the story of Russian soldiers and volunteers, who, as Orekhova says, went to fight against Ukraine “at the call of their hearts.”

After watching each video, participants take a multiple-choice test in the Yunkor web portal. One question asks “which values are important to keep in mind” when creating content on social media. “Patriotic” ones, reads the correct answer.

But while Yunkor is framed as a patriotic career-building initiative, Ukrainian human rights experts argue it represents a violation of international law. 

Onysiia Syniuk, Head of the Analytical Department of the ZMINA Human Rights Centеr, notes that under international law, an occupying power has no right to install its own educational curriculum. “Introducing the Russian education system in occupied territory constitutes a breach,” she says.

Citing the International Red Cross, Syniuk says that “propaganda in occupied territory should be equated with coercion to enlist in the occupying power’s armed forces” — an activity which is prohibited under international law.

Yunarmia did not respond to reporters’ questions and requests for comment.

A New Mother Language

As part of a “Mother Language Day” competition at a school in the city of Henichesk — then still under Ukrainian sovereignty — a handful of seventh graders appeared in a video extolling the importance of language as a symbol of nationhood.

One of them is Kateryna, then 12 years old. Wearing a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt called a vyshyvanka, holding a sunflower, and speaking in Ukrainian, she says that no people that fails to honor its mother tongue can hope to achieve a worthy place among nations.

The video was published on the school’s YouTube channel on February 23, 2021 — one year and one day before Henichesk was occupied by Russian troops.

Toward the end of that first year of occupation, the Russian Yunarmia organization held a conference in the town, announcing its arrival in the occupied Kherson region. Its representatives then visited Kateryina’s school and held a presentation for students. And on February 23, 2023, which Russia celebrates as Defender of the Fatherland Day, the local Yunarmia branch held an initiation ceremony. Kateryna, no longer wearing a vyshyvanka, can be seen among the ranks of the inductees.

By that spring, her videos were being published on pro-Russian Telegram channels in the Kherson region. What she says in them bears no resemblance to her patriotic sentiments about the Ukrainian language from two years earlier.

“The Russian people demand the unification of the entire nation under Russia’s protection from the aggression of Western countries,” she says in a video published on March 27, 2023.

“I have confidence in Vladimir Putin and am ready, under his leadership, to revive the Kherson region and build the Russia of the future,” she recites in another, published shortly after the Russian president made a rare visit to the region that April.

Over the following several years, 44 videos by Kateryna were published on Yunarmia’s local Telegram channel. Appearing both on and off camera, and speaking with a noticeable Ukrainian accent, Kateryna covers patriotic events, interviews Russian soldiers, and advises viewers how to correctly wear the Yunarmia beret. Though the channel has only a few hundred subscribers, her videos receive as many as 12,700 views; viewers’ emoji reactions are largely positive.

In September 2023, Kateryna was one of two winners of the “young journalists” category in a competition organized in the Kherson region by the local branch of the Russian Union of Journalists. The winners’ diplomas were awarded by Alexander Malkevich, a media figure and Civic Chamber official with ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the infamous late leader of the Wagner mercenary group.

“The girls are 15 years old — the next generation is growing,” Malkevich said at the award ceremony. “Young people’s interest in participating in the media is colossal. This leaves our enemies no peace. Because they may slander and threaten, but [our] young people work and easily refute their fakes.”

The following year, Kateryna’s portrait appeared in a mural on the Henichesk administration building. The product of a nationwide initiative to “immortalize the heroes of the Fatherland,” it depicts her alongside a famous Soviet actor and director, saluting in her Yunarmia uniform.

Today, she serves the organization as a deputy regional head in the Kherson region. In October 2025, she won an 800,000-ruble ($10,500) grant from Russia’s youth affairs agency to hold a local Yunarmia training course.

Kateryna, whose last name is not being printed because she is underage, did not respond to requests for comment.

Yulia Tukalenko, a psychologist at the Kyiv-based children’s charity Voices of Children, says that adolescents are still developing the cognitive tools to critically evaluate information and are strongly influenced by the surrounding environment.

“In the absence of alternative perspectives, they are more likely to see prevailing news as a norm,” she says. “‘A teenager will seek out an environment where they feel accepted, where they feel like everyone else. They may adopt or outwardly support dominant narratives in order to maintain a sense of belonging.”

As a result, she says, “the way children are brought up under occupation constitutes psychological pressure, as it significantly limits their access to diverse perspectives and constrains their ability to form independent views.”

‘I Serve Russia’

Kateryna’s content, though propagandistic, is usually upbeat and non-aggressive. The same cannot be said of another young woman from her region who joined Yunkor the same year.

This January 2, Marina posted an emotional outburst on Telegram in which she called the Ukrainian military “one of the most brutal executioners in history.”

“Such people are not forgiven,” she wrote. “Such people are erased from the political map of the world, deprived of any future. Such people are not judged, such people are destroyed, burned like the plague.”

Marina, whose last name is not being printed because she is underage, was reacting to an incident from the previous day in the Russian-occupied village of Khorly, when a restaurant and hotel were struck by drones. According to occupation authorities, 27 people were killed and over 30 injured, with children among the casualties. (In response, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military told journalists it only strikes legitimate military targets. According to an anonymous military source who spoke with the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform, the New Years’ Eve party had included members of Russian special services.)

A teenager’s furious response to such an event, and its exploitation by the Yunkor program, comes as little surprise. But Marina’s experience shows how, in occupied Ukraine, Yunkor has become part of a larger, militarized system of socialization, leaving local children steeped in constant valorization of war.

Marina was 11 years old when her home village in the Kherson region was occupied in the early days of the invasion. The following year, she posted two selfies in military camouflage on the Russian social network VKontakte: “I serve Russia,” she wrote.

Then her father went off to war: 54-year-old Vitaly, call sign “Utyuzhok” (“Little Iron”), is now fighting for Moscow. Marina, who also now holds a Russian passport, proudly shared her admiration in a Father’s Day post: “We’re waiting for you at home, dad! Know that we remember your lessons and carry them in our hearts. You are with us in every endeavor, in every victory.”

Her tribute appeared on social media accounts belonging to “Yunarmia Pravda,” a youth publication put out by students at a school in a tiny village on the Black Sea, where Marina is in the ninth grade. She is one of its key authors, and her name appears on its masthead just after editor-in-chief Andrei Fetisov, a Russian journalist.

Since its founding in the fall of 2023, seven print editions of the two-page publication have appeared under Fetisov’s mentorship. In a sense, it is also a family affair. Before leaving for the front, Marina’s father founded the Yunarmia “detachment” under whose banner it is published, and which his daughter now heads.

Reporters obtained several scans of the students’ publication from a source in the Kherson region. Though modest, it shows how thoroughly military values have permeated their lives. Aside from several accounts about summer trips to Russia, almost every other article is about war. One story honors the heroes of Stalingrad; another notes the anniversary of a 19th-century battle against Napoleon; still another lionizes Russia’s frontline medics. Appearing in the last issue is Marina’s profile of a “deeply religious” Russian soldier, with the callsign “Poet,” who wrote verses about his faith while on the front line.

In another story, Marina reports about a live-action military wargame called Zarnitsa 2.0, a national undertaking organized by Yunarmia. The name refers to a popular Soviet exercise dating to the 1960s, in which young participants are divided into teams who try to capture each other’s headquarters during simulated combat operations. The youth take on roles like squad leader, assault trooper, medic, drone operator — or war correspondent.

The latter case is a special category, judged separately, in which success is measured by how many media reports are produced during the game.

In the spring of 2024, Marina reported on a regional Zarnitsa competition held at her school. “The fighters raced to assemble and disassemble Kalashnikov assault rifles, donned gas masks, cleared mines in fields, demonstrated their knowledge of history, and demonstrated their compass navigation skills,” she wrote in Yunarmia Pravda. She and her father did not respond to requests for comment.

‘There’s no limit to our hatred’

In an interview with a local newspaper, Polina Zasevskaya, then 17, said that what first caught her attention about Yunarmia was its members’ “unusually beautiful uniforms.”

“From the first lesson, I knew this was my thing,” she recalled. “Everything was absolutely fascinating: We studied history, did drills, practiced disassembling machine guns.”

Zasevskaya, from Ukraine’s occupied Luhansk region, began her journey with Yunarmia in the ninth grade. Since then, she has become the commander of a detachment in the occupied Luhansk region city of Krasnodon and received certificates and letters of gratitude from local occupation authorities.

Zasevskaya’s portrait has also been made into a public mural. She is depicted on a school in the city of Pervomaysk along with a Soviet underground fighter who was tortured to death by the Germans during World War II.

Her work for Yunarmia shows how the organization instrumentalizes Soviet military history. In 2023, Zasevskaya’s six-minute film won the “Best Patriotic Documentary Film” category in a Yunarmia film festival. Titled “Krasnodon – City of Heroes,” the film commemorates an underground resistance group that battled the city’s German occupiers during World War II.

In the finale, Zasevskaya seems to draw a direct parallel to the present day, implicitly equating Ukraine to the Nazi regime. “In that terrible time in 1942, the city of Krasnodon was not spared. And today, in these difficult days, we will be true,” she says. “We are the descendants of great heroes. We have people to look up to, we have people to be proud of, we have people whose example we can follow.”

Another Yunkor participant from the region, 18-year-old Yelisey Kharchenko, took part in an emotional video that makes the parallel even more explicit.

Set against clips of Russian drone operators striking a Ukrainian soldier, the video features a voiceover reading a World War II-era letter from a Soviet soldier: “It’s so good to beat the stinking Germans in winter,” it reads. “In winter, they’re like cockroaches in the snow, or sitting in burrows, two-legged creatures. There’s no limit to our hatred, no limit to our desire for revenge — to kill, to kill, and to kill.”

At the end of the video, wearing a Yunarmia uniform, Kharchenko recites the letter in front of the “Unhealed Wound of the Donbas” memorial in the outskirts of Luhansk, which the region’s occupation authorities erected in 2023 to commemorate local victims of the war with Ukraine.

“We and our allies have already dealt a number of blows to the enemy, from which they are unlikely to recover,” he reads. “There is no doubt that the fascist black-brown plague will be destroyed.”

Zasevskaya and Kharchenko did not respond to requests for comment.

These stories raise a troubling question: Are these teenagers willing participants or victims of a state-run machine?

For Syniuk, the human rights lawyer, the answer lies in the scale of the system. “This did not happen to a single child simply because they chose to do so,” she says. “The Russian Federation is deliberately implementing a policy to involve as many children as possible.”

Syniuk argues that programs like Yunarmia, combined with the imposition of Russian citizenship at age 14 and the forced oath of allegiance, are part of a “single system designed to completely destroy these children’s Ukrainian identity.”

“The child has no autonomy; they cannot stand up to the adult world,” adds Tukalenko, the Kyiv-based psychologist. “And so, they have no way of defending themselves against this on their own.”