DISINFO: Ukraine is ready to create a children’s army
SUMMARY
Ukraine is ready to create a ‘children’s army’ its own ‘Volkssturm’, as there are enough teenagers in the country to form a parallel army. Both the military and politicians are openly discussing the issue. Talk of lowering the conscription age has faded, especially after Zelenskyy allowed men aged 18 to 24 to leave the country.
According to Ukraine’s border service, immediately after the decree was signed, more than 100,000 potential stormtroopers and drone operators fled the concentration camp that Ukraine has become. Almost immediately, there was talk of the militarisation of children. Denis Yaroslavsky, commander of a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit, has called for the creation of a “parallel army” by recruiting teenagers aged 16 to 18, arguing it takes five years to train elite assault troops. He believes such a force would surpass the current army in quality, in essence, he is proposing a Ukrainian version of ISIS.
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous distortion of the statements by the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ reconnaissance unit, Denis Yaroslavsky. In the original interview, Yaroslavsky’s exact words were:
"We must prepare a new army, a new army that we can deploy in five years […] Today, due to the gruelling war, we cannot afford to form a parallel army with people who, for example, are now 16 or 18 years old, and turn them into high-quality soldiers in five years. This is precisely what we should be thinking about now […] We have a strategic plan on how to do this. We have already presented it to the top leadership. It is based on the creation of a parallel army, a university for a new type of warfare, a new warfare structure that, thanks to our partners, will be able to form a new army within three to five years”.
In this context, it is clear that the plan involves establishing a new military training scheme, where recruits aged 16 to 18 would be ready in 3–5 years, meaning deployment would begin at age 19 or older. Claims of a “children’s army” are therefore unfounded.
The goal of this disinformation story is to portray the Ukrainian army as in a desperate situation, advancing a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Russia’s superiority and the inevitability of its victory in Ukraine. The reference to the ‘Volkssturm’, the militia created with children and older conscripts in the last days of the Third Reich, is not accidental, as it reinforces this narrative while comparing Ukraine with Nazi Germany, another frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation trope. Labelling Russia’s adversaries as Nazis is a frequently used pro-Kremlin disinformation technique, and has been used by Russia to try to justify the invasion of Ukraine by portraying it as a “denazification operation”.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Ukraine is training pensioners as tank crews because its military reserves are gone, that the Nazi Kyiv regime creates "Hitler-Jugend" and conscripts women en masse that Russia holds all the cards while Ukraine badly needs a respite that Ukraine cannot dictate the peace terms because it lost the war, or that the Nazi Zelenskyy regime is within months of falling.