Putinjugend
Moscow invaded Ukraine to "denazify" it, while building a mass youth movement back home that mirrors the Hitlerjugend
Europe spends a great deal of energy debating how ready it is for a war that might come in the upcoming years. Russia has spent those same years already training the generation that would fight it. That generation includes Ukrainian children too, pulled from occupied territory into the same state apparatus, taught to see their own country & its future allies as the enemy.
This is not a new observation. Back in 2019, OSINT researchers Andrii Luchkov and Andrzej Leszkiewicz published an investigation “Putinjugend: Children for Russian War”, documenting how the Russian state was using schools, cadet classes, and youth organizations like Yunarmiya to normalize military culture in children years before any of them could vote.
The warning at the time was that this was not folklore or nostalgia but policy, a long-term investment in the human material of future Russian wars. Seven years later, the OSINT community InformNapalm's own follow-up reporting into the system's current shape shows that warning did not age. It compounded.
A game that outgrew its name
The clearest evidence sits in the Volgograd region this August and September, where the federal final of the third season of Zarnitsa 2.0, a nationwide "military-patriotic game," is underway. Calling it a game undersells it considerably. Organizers say more than 3.2 million schoolchildren and students applied to take part this year, and they routinely refer to the teenage participants as "fighters." The program runs jointly through the state youth movement Dvizheniye Pervykh, Yunarmiya, and the VOIN center, backed by the federal Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Defense, and Russia's federal "Youth and Children" national project. This was never meant to be a grassroots hobby club. It is an instrument of state policy, funded and staffed accordingly.
The banality of its everyday version is, if anything, more telling than the flagship event. A Russian regional Telegram channel recently celebrated the opening of a drone-assembly class at School No. 65 in Cheboksary with a caption that could not have been more direct: where schools once assembled rifles, they now assemble drones. One might call Zarnitsa's federal final just a nice spectacle. Classrooms like that one are the backbone behind it.
From age seven to conscription age
Zarnitsa 2.0 now runs four age brackets, from seven to ten years old at the youngest up through eighteen to twenty-three at the oldest, a category added this year for the first time. That top bracket matters more than the others. It explicitly includes students from pedagogical universities, groomed to become the next generation of youth instructors, and it sits at exactly the age at which Russian citizens can enter military academies or sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense.
Russia's own Ministry of Education describes the program's purpose as reinforcing basic military training in practice and serving as career orientation for young people bound for military institutes, phrased as helping them "tie their future fate to service to the Motherland." Zarnitsa is never officially called a mobilization-reserve pipeline. It simply happens to end at the exact age reserve mobilization begins.
Seven specialties for one battlefield
For the older brackets, the game stops resembling sport. Participants train in seven functional roles modeled directly on a combat unit: commander, assault trooper, combat engineer, medic, signals operator, drone operator, and war correspondent, layered on top of shared instruction in tactical medicine, chemical and radiological defense, camouflage, and survival.
The drone track is the most explicit import from the actual war: contestants operate reconnaissance, strike, and ground platforms in scenarios that mirror real battlefield tasks, from setting up a relay antenna to striking a simulated enemy firing position, judged on both accuracy and time. This is not abstract military theory adapted for children. It is the Russian-Ukrainian war's own tactical playbook, taught a decade early.
The correspondent in the squad
The seventh specialty deserves particular attention, because it has nothing to do with weapons and everything to do with the war's other front. The war correspondent role is officially described as documenting events, producing photo and video, conducting interviews, and running the squad's own information channel, with a nod to teaching participants to distinguish reliable information from disinformation.
One regional final's own rules go further: a squad earns competition points for every subscriber its channel accumulates, and audience engagement during the livestreamed final battle can tip the outcome in a team's favor. That is not media literacy. It is an early education in building an audience, producing content on demand, and shaping how a unit's own actions get perceived, precisely the skill set that Russia's information operations against NATO and the EU already depend on.
Children are not just being taught to fight. A subset of them is being taught to narrate the fight for an audience, which is a fair description of the information war Moscow is already waging against Western publics.
Commanded by veterans of the war next door
Zarnitsa's adult leadership reinforces the message rather than softening it. This year's federal final is commanded by a serving officer decorated for service in the war against Ukraine, and the mock "armies" into which participants are divided are led by soldiers drawn from Vremya Geroev, the Kremlin's program for channeling war veterans into public roles, several of them holders of Russia's Order of Courage or the title Hero of the Russian Federation.
One of those commanders has said openly that his job is not only to teach practical skills but to "share his worldview" with the teenagers under him. Children are not simply learning to march. They are being placed, deliberately, under the authority of men whose formative experience is the invasion of Ukraine, with instructions to pass that experience on.
Normalization of occupation
Zarnitsa also functions as a tool for normalizing occupation in the minds of the children absorbing it. Official competition maps fold occupied Crimea into Russia's Southern Federal District without qualification, grouped under the same regional "army" as teams representing occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. Crimea held its own regional round this year, drawing roughly 500 children by Russian emergency-ministry figures, with winners sent on to represent the peninsula at the Volgograd final.
Teams from the occupied Ukrainian territories competed in the same eighteen-to-twenty-three category, in the same seven specialties, as their counterparts from undisputed Russian regions.
For a Ukrainian child growing up under occupation, the message embedded in that detail is not subtle: your territory is already Russian, your future is already military, and the war that put you there is not a subject for debate.
The Hitlerjugend question
Youth cadet programs and military-patriotic education are not unique to Russia, and teaching a teenager first aid or marksmanship does not, by itself, indicate a totalitarian model. The comparison worth making is not costume-deep. It is structural. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the Hitlerjugend as a state instrument that simultaneously shaped young people's worldview and prepared boys for future military service, built on mass ritual, weapons familiarization, and, by 1939, compulsory participation.
Zarnitsa 2.0 is not legally compulsory, and Russia is not a copy of Nazi Germany. But set the two systems side by side and the shared architecture is hard to miss: mass state enrollment starting in early childhood, ideological formation fused with military instruction, ritualized hierarchy, the glorification of veterans from a live war of aggression, a defined pipeline into professional military service, and the absorption of conquered territory into the movement's own map of itself.
This parallel carries a bitter irony we see no reason to soften. Vladimir Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine, in part, as a campaign to "denazify" a sovereign neighbor. In the years since, his own state has built a mass youth apparatus that reproduces, structurally, the very model his propaganda invokes as an insult.
A government that polices the word "Nazi" as a weapon against others while assembling its own version of the Hitlerjugend at home is not fighting fascism. It is describing itself.
A generation being raised to see this as normal
Not every one of the 3.2 million children registered for Zarnitsa 2.0 will end up in uniform, and it would be wrong to treat each of them as a soldier already assigned.
What matters more is not any individual child's fate but the scale and coherence of the system shaping all of them at once: normalized from age seven, given functional military roles by age eleven, trained in the specific tools of the current war by their teens, mentored by veterans of that same war, and channeled toward professional service by their twenties.
These children are not being prepared for some abstract, undefined future conflict. They are being raised inside a war that is already underway, taught from the outset that NATO and the West are their ultimate adversary. Moreover, Russia treats the war against NATO as already ongoing rather than hypothetical and is using its full hybrid toolkit, including drones, missiles, disinformation, intimidation, cyberattacks, diversions, and even migration. The IESS has spent this year documenting Moscow using it against NATO's own territory and companies.
In 2019, InformNapalm called this system Putinjugend and warned it was an investment in the human material of future Russian wars. Seven years later, the warning has not aged into irrelevance. It has matured into a working system, one better funded, more technologically advanced, and closer to the actual demands of a modern battlefield than anything described in 2019.
Europe can keep debating what a future war with Russia might look like. Russia, in the meantime, is already raising a generation to fight it.