🇺🇦🇷🇺Ukrajina vs Rusko

Inside the Pipeline: Researchers Link Russian Energy Giants to Abducted Ukrainian Children

Yale Humanitarian Lab concluded that Gazprom and Rosneft are “directly implicated” in Russian war crimes related to the forced deportation of children from Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territories.

Kyiv Post

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26. března 2026

3 min čtení

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Researchers at Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) have concluded with “high confidence” that Russian energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom are complicit in the mass deportation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children.

Through its use of open-source intelligence and satellite imagery, the HRL has become instrumental in tracking and documenting Russian war crimes – particularly regarding the roughly 20,000 children abducted from Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

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In a report published on Wednesday, the HRL found that Russian state-owned oil and gas companies Gazprom and Rosneft, along with their subsidiaries and trade unions,  “underwrote and facilitated the transportation and/or re-education of approximately 2,158 children from Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2022-2025.”

The report notes that the HRL’s work became more timely when US President Donald Trump temporarily authorized the sale of Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products already in transit on March 12. 

The move, aimed at stabilizing global oil prices after the US-Israeli-Iran war sent them soaring this month, has re-opened the US market to Russian oil.

“Gazprom and Rosneft are the first known Russian Federation-affiliated corporate entities directly implicated in Russia’s alleged war crimes related to child deportation that are currently making money from US consumer spending at the time of this publication,” the report adds.

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More than 2,100 children were taken from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions to at least six camps across Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine: “Prometheus” camp in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region, “Signal” and “Kubanskaya Niva” camps in Krasnodar Krai, “Art-Quest” camp and “A.V. Kazakevich Children’s Health Camp” in Russian-occupied Crimea, and “Sputnik” camp in Russia’s Rostov region.

HRL investigators found evidence of the militarization of children. Photographs of an event held at “Prometheus” camp, for instance, show children being taught military drills, hand-to-hand combat, grenade throwing, and rifle shooting.

Indoctrination activities also took place at a number of the camps. Although the HRL was unable to identify the types of material or narratives to which the children were exposed, publicly available documents show that the energy giants’ subsidiaries held or funded “patriotic education initiatives.”

The HRL based their research on Gazprom and Rosneft’s “own public statements, social media posts, and corporate documents” – which the HRL says show that they are “willing accomplices” in the same activities that led the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova in 2023.