According to a new study, Russian energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft have played an important role in indoctrination of forcefully deported Ukrainian children.
Russia’s energy companies Gazprom and Rosneft helped facilitate and sponsor the transport and re-education of forcefully deported Ukrainian children, Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) stated in its latest report.
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According to the study released on Wednesday, two Russian state-owned oil and gas companies, including their subsidiaries, “underwrote and facilitated the transportation and/or re-education of approximately 2,158 children from Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2022 (and) 2025.”
“This study is the first public demonstration that these companies' have integral involvement in Russia’s systematic campaign of child deportation and indoctrination,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director at the Humanitarian Research Lab.
The Yale HRL team insists that their report's findings are even more important given the US administration’s decision on 12 March to ease some sanctions that prevent other countries from buying Russian oil and petroleum already loaded on vessels at sea,in an effort to ease the energy supply crunch sparked by the Iran war.
Researchers point out that this time-limited waiver includes crude and petroleum products of Gazprom and Rosneft.
“As a result, 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," the study said.
How Gazprom and Rosneft are implicated
The report identifies at least six camps in Russia and Russia-occupied territories where Ukrainian children were taken, including facilities owned by Gazprom- and Rosneft-controlled subsidiaries.
They have reportedly helped facilitate and sponsor the transport and re-education of Ukraine’s children through direct ownership of camps, provision of camp vouchers, and coordination of pro-Russia indoctrination.
Yale HRL team notes that Gazprom and Rosneft have sponsored children from Russia to attend camps since as early as 2008, and then included Ukrainian children from Russia-occupied territories since the first invasion of 2014.
HRL has established in previous reports that while many children were taken to camps in Russia and Russia-occupied Crimea with the consent of their parents, other children have been sent to camps without the consent.
The researchers say Russia’s systematic campaign to deport, indoctrinate, and in some cases, foster or adopt children from Ukraine has long been shown by Yale HRL to integrally rely on a complex network of federal, regional and local governmental agencies working in concert with non-governmental groups to function.
“What this report demonstrates for the first time is that Gazprom and Rosneft, two of Russia’s most critical oil and gas companies, are willing accomplices in this interconnected web of diverse entities.”
And while Gazprom and Rosneft have been comprehensively sanctioned by the US and the EU, their subsidiaries have not been.
Yale HRL researchers found that 80% of the entities involved in the transfer and indoctrination of Ukraine’s children to Russia and Russia-occupied Crimea identified in this report have not been sanctioned by Washington or Brussels.
Ukraine has been able to verify Russia’s deportation of over 19,500 children since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
These are the children for whom detailed information has been collected — their place of residence in Ukraine and their territorial location in Russia are known.
The actual number is likely to be much higher. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children closer to 35,000.