Capturing the minds: The role of child deportation in maintaining Russian authority over Ukraine’s occupied territories

Journal Article: Capturing the minds: The role of child deportation in maintaining Russian authority over Ukraine’s occupied territories

Journal: European Journal of International Security, which publishes theoretical, methodological and empirical papers at the cutting-edge of security research, and can be found here.

Date of Publication: March 9, 2026

Authors: Dr. Jade McGlynn, an author and Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research focuses on Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, propaganda, memory politics, and state-society relations in Russia. More information can be found here.

Anastasiia Romaniuk, a digital platforms analyst, affiliated with Civil Network OPORA, a Ukrainian think tank with unique local, national, and international expertise. Romaniuk has expertise propaganda, disinformation, online campaigning and social media regulation.

How to Cite: McGlynn J, Romaniuk A. Capturing the minds: The role of child deportation in maintaining Russian authority over Ukraine’s occupied territories. European Journal of International Security. Published online 2026:1-24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2026.10056

Abstract: Russia’s systematic deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories since 2014 is a central instrument of Russian governance. This article conceptualises the abduction of children as politicised captivity – the state-directed, long-term custodial control of a vulnerable population segment for explicitly political ends. The removal of children serves the strategic goals of exerting coercive pressure on local families, disrupting Ukrainian identity transmission, and facilitating demographic restructuring. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ and Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, we analyse how institutional and legal mechanisms, from ‘recreation’ camps to streamlined adoption decrees, are employed to seize control over the identity formation and future political subjectivity of minors. Empirical findings, derived from witness testimonies and interviews, detail the operational pathways of transfer (e.g., filtration, holiday schemes) and the resulting experiences of psychological trauma, educational disruption, and ideological indoctrination. We argue that by targeting children, Russian authorities employ a sophisticated form of biopolitical control that is fundamental to maintaining and legitimising their long-term authority in contested spaces.

ISSE Comment: This article aligns closely with ISSE’s underlying inquiry into how exceptional forms of power are converted into durable techniques of rule. At one level, it documents grave abuses against Ukrainian children; at a deeper level, it shows how those abuses are embedded within an administrative, legal, and ideological apparatus designed to consolidate authority in occupied territory. That is precisely the kind of transformation ISSE seeks to examine: the movement from emergency or wartime justification to routinized governance. The article is especially valuable in showing that the relevant question is not only whether a violation occurred, but how coercive practices are institutionalized through decrees, custody systems, educational policy, demographic engineering, and narratives of “protection” or “rescue.” In ISSE’s framework, this is a revealing case of the exception becoming normalized, where extraordinary interventions into family life, identity, and legal status are made to appear administratively ordinary.

The piece also speaks directly to ISSE’s broader concern with the relationship between sovereignty, legality, and political subject formation. Its use of biopolitics, the state of exception, and necropolitics helps illuminate how modern systems of control operate not only through overt repression, but through the management of populations, the reordering of legal protections, and the attempted remaking of future citizens. By focusing on children, the article identifies one of the most consequential sites of long-term political struggle: the shaping of memory, belonging, and national continuity across generations. For ISSE, this makes the article important not simply as an account of wartime abuse, but as an analysis of how state power seeks to reconstitute social and political reality itself, through the capture of vulnerable populations, the suspension or distortion of legal constraint, and the strategic use of administrative systems to transform exceptional domination into an enduring order.

A text version of the article can be accessed here, and a PDF version can be accessed here.

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