Russia has released a propaganda documentary titled “SVOi Deti” (“Our Special Military Operation Children”). It tells the story of Ukrainian children taken to Russian recreational camps as part of a youth program called “Poslezavtra” (The Day After Tomorrow) for what Moscow calls ”integration sessions.” Both were produced by Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for her role in the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied territories. Officials in Kyiv, independent researchers, and journalists believe that programs like “Poslezavtra” are designed to indoctrinate and re-educate Ukrainian children. The film premiered on May 26, 2026, at the Gorky Film Studio, according to a post on Lvova-Belova’s Telegram channel. Three days later, it was released on the Okko streaming platform. Here’s what we know about the movie and its creators.

SVOi Deti is a feature-length advertisement for the “Poslezavtra” youth program, under which organizers send children from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, as well as from occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, to children’s camps in Russia.

Until the fall of 2024, the program’s organizers called the trips “integration sessions” — a term they later rebranded as “youth sessions,” according to posts on Lvova-Belova’s official website. By 2025, the sessions had expanded to include not only Ukrainian children but also teenagers from the families of Russian military personnel fighting in Ukraine.

Since August 2022, organizers have run 30 sessions at children’s camps scattered across the Moscow, Rostov and Smolensk regions, Krasnodar Territory and annexed Crimea. More than 4,000 children have been brought there — drawn from Russian-occupied swaths of Ukraine, including the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, from Russian border areas that have endured regular shelling since the start of the war, and the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, recognized by Moscow but almost no one else.

“Poslezavtra” describes its goal as helping minors who have “lived through difficult times” — the program’s euphemism for Russia’s invasion.

Ukrainian authorities accuse Moscow of illegally deporting children from Russian-occupied territories. The exact number of Ukrainian children taken to Russia during the war is unknown. Ukrainian government figures put the number at more than 20,000. Kyiv says slightly more than 2,000 have been repatriated.

One teenager back in Ukraine said children at a Russian camp were beaten and lied to. The same person said campers were told that their Ukrainian parents had abandoned them.

Independent researchers from Yale have published several reports (1, 2, 3) documenting how children from occupied Ukrainian territories are subjected to “re-education” and militarization at children’s camps.

Meduza found that since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia’s Education Ministry has been developing methodological guidelines for the “indoctrination” of Ukrainian children brought to Russia. The ministry instructs Russian teachers and social workers to “re-educate” Ukrainian minors on the basis of “the spiritual and moral values, historical and national-cultural traditions of Russia,” aiming to give deported children “a Russian identity.”

The director behind SVOi Deti is Vladislav Kuznetsov, who also made the film Pasha Tekhnik: Za Kem Stoit Andergraund? (“Pasha Tekhnik: Who’s Behind the Underground?”) and the television series Byt Tsyganom (“Being a Gypsy”) and Obshchak: Glavnaya OPG Rossii (“The Common Fund: Russia’s Top Organized Crime Group”) — all released on Okko.

The Russian state broadcaster Channel One covered the film’s premiere in its evening news programming, presenting SVOi Deti as a movie about “kids who spent years surviving Ukrainian shelling” and “about pain, perseverance, and help.”

The film follows several children from cities in Russian-occupied Ukraine — Donetsk, Mariupol, Luhansk, and Skadovsk — as they describe what they experienced during the war: shelling, injuries, and separation from loved ones.

Their accounts are interspersed with footage of demonstrations, unrest, and combat. The “integration” sessions, meanwhile, are shown as breezy affairs — children playing, doing sports, and making crafts, with counselors and psychologists on hand to help them cope with the trauma of the war.

“Something of an atmosphere is created here that automatically makes them [the children] more responsive, more open. It’s the general effect of combat operations, which brings the kids together and makes them feel the taste and flow of life more keenly,” one of the counselors said of life at the camp.

At the end of the film, the protagonists say they want to become volunteers and are already “going around and helping” other families affected by the war. In the trailer for SVOi Deti, one of the participants says that after the camp the children “will come to the front and help people” — but those words were cut from the final release.

“We very much want our projects to be seamless — not to end with a single camp session, so that we continue to communicate with both the children and the parents,” Lvova-Belova said.

The oldest of the film’s subjects, 18-year-old Dmitry Mizonov, lives in Donetsk and is a second-year journalism student at Donetsk State University, according to iStories, an independent Russian investigative outlet. He has been attending “integration sessions” for several years and afterward became a regular participant in Russian state programs, using social media to denounce the Ukrainian military and government while voicing support for Russia.

The documentary’s production costs are unknown. Neither Meduza nor iStories could find any public record of the film’s budget. Financial backers include the Internet Development Institute (IRI), the news outlet Lenta.ru, and the charitable foundation Strana Dlya Detei (A Country for Children), which runs the “Poslezavtra” program.

The foundation is headed by Alexei Petrov, an adviser in the office of Children’s Commissioner Lvova-Belova. Petrov also posted neo-Nazi content on social media between 2011 and 2014, when he was 16 to 19. Among the posts: photos of a T-shirt bearing a Celtic cross and a baseball cap bearing the number 88 (a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”), a comment reading “Roman salute, from the heart to the sun,” videos from WotanJugend, a neo-Nazi organization, and an announcement for a neo-Nazi festival.