Kateryna, Age 12 - Decipon Insights

At Twelve

In 2021, a twelve-year-old girl in the Kherson region made a video celebrating the Ukrainian language.

By 2025, she was seventeen. She had published 44 propaganda videos for Yunarmia, Russia’s defense ministry-backed youth organization. A Russian state agency had awarded her 800,000 rubles — roughly $10,500 — to develop “patriotic education” in the occupied territories.

Her name is Kateryna. Between 2021 and 2025, she did not make a single choice to become a propagandist. She made a series of small choices, each one reasonable, each one slightly different from the last, each one recorded and celebrated and turned into a credential.

This is what the program is designed to do.

The Program

Yunkor — Young Correspondents — operates under Yunarmia, a paramilitary youth organization founded in 2016 by Russia’s defense ministry. Yunarmia runs sports clubs, military history programs, and drills; Yunkor is the media wing.

The curriculum is 26 lectures covering journalism, social media, and “information security.” Master classes from Kremlin-aligned state media figures. Trips to Moscow for national youth media forums. Reporting internships near the frontline. Publication in Yunarmia-affiliated outlets. Awards. Grants. Recognition.

Ksenia Barladyan, head of Yunkor’s press service, described the purpose to participants directly: “Create positive, correct… patriotic content… this will be your contribution to victory in the information war.”

The information war she meant is not the one fought with missiles. The program has been running since 2017. By the time the OCCRP investigation published, it had enrolled approximately 5,000 participants. In occupied Ukrainian territories specifically, researchers counted around 140 active members — 60 in Donetsk, 6 in Kherson, the remainder distributed across the occupied south and east.

The funding is real: 9 million rubles in 2024 for Yunkor alone. Russia’s defense ministry received over 500 million rubles in total for youth programming in the same period.

What They Produce

The products are not sophisticated by professional standards. A six-minute documentary drawing parallels between Ukraine and the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union. Video reports featuring Russian soldiers. Social media posts from the frontline. A youth publication called Yunarmia Pravda. A film titled “Krasnodon — City of Heroes,” commemorating Soviet-era resistance in a city in Luhansk.

One participant, Polina Zasevskaya, created the Nazi-Ukraine documentary and received a mural in her honor alongside figures from the Soviet Great Patriotic War. Another, Marina — whose father serves in the Russian military — heads her local Yunarmia detachment and produces content under the mentorship of a Russian journalist.

The content is not going to deceive anyone outside its intended audience. It does not need to. Its audience is the occupied community in which these teenagers live — neighbors, classmates, parents, and other potential recruits. Every video Kateryna publishes is also an advertisement for the program that trained her.

The Mechanism

Human rights lawyer Onysiia Syniuk has argued that participation in Yunkor should be understood as coercion to serve the occupying power — equivalent in international law to forced military service. The occupied territories are legally prohibited from imposing educational curricula or propaganda programs on the civilian population. Yunkor operates in that prohibited space.

But calling it coercion in the traditional sense misses the more specific mechanism at work.

Kateryna was not forced at gunpoint to make a video celebrating the Ukrainian language at twelve. She was a child who made a video. The video was celebrated. She made another one. She was given a program, a curriculum, peers, mentors, trips to Moscow, a national forum, an award. At seventeen, she has a public record, a community identity, a credential, and an 800,000-ruble grant. The question is not whether she feels coerced. The question is whether, from where she now stands, she has any available path that does not involve continuing.

Psychologist Yulia Tukalenko, working with displaced Ukrainian children, has described the dynamic: children lack the autonomy to resist adult systems designed to destroy Ukrainian identity. The system does not need force when it can offer belonging, recognition, and a clear path forward. The occupation provides the environmental enclosure — the child grows up without access to Ukrainian-language institutions, alternative educational frameworks, or peers building identities outside the Russian system. Within that enclosed environment, Yunkor is the available form of achievement.

This is a well-documented process in the social psychology of identity formation. The commitments we make publicly, especially in adolescence, become constitutive of who we are. Every video Kateryna published was a public commitment. Each commitment required a slightly larger one to remain coherent. The program did not need to change her beliefs by force; it provided scaffolding for her to build, step by step, a self that could produce the 44th video as naturally as she produced the first.

At twelve, she was making content about language. At seventeen, the content has a different politics. The arc was not imposed at any single point. It was built.

The Weapons They Aren’t Training For

The operational payoff of Yunkor is not the content it produces today. The content is adequate for local-audience propaganda in occupied territories — but the program’s durable value is what it produces over the next decade.

A participant who completes the program is not a passive propagandist. They are a person who has internalized a media framework, who has practiced content production, who has a network of peers and mentors within Russian state-adjacent media, who has credentials within that system, and whose identity is partly organized around their role as an information warrior.

When that person is twenty-five or thirty-five, they are not a former participant in a youth program. They are a journalist, a media producer, a communications professional, a teacher — operating in whatever context they occupy, with a formed perspective on what media is for and a practiced ability to produce it. The investment horizon for this program is generational.

This is what distinguishes Yunkor from the operations that generate the most coverage — the deepfake campaigns, the AI-generated content farms, the synthetic amplification networks. Those operations work fast. They produce content at scale and burn out, get detected, get taken down. They are tactical.

Yunkor is strategic. It is not producing content at scale. It is producing people who will produce content for the rest of their lives.

Influence Tactics Breakdown

Progressive Commitment Capture. The program does not recruit propagandists; it creates them incrementally. Each small act of participation — a video, a post, a publication — is a public commitment that must be integrated into the participant’s self-concept. The next commitment is slightly larger. The process is gradual enough that no single step looks like conversion, but the cumulative effect is a person whose identity is organized around the program’s goals. Forced opinion change is fragile; self-authored identity change is durable.

Environmental Enclosure. The program operates in occupied territories where alternative institutions have been removed, suppressed, or made dangerous. Ukrainian-language media, education, and civic organizations are not available alternatives within the same environment. The enclosure is not created by Yunkor but exploited by it: a child with no access to competing frameworks for achievement will navigate toward available ones.

Institutional Credential Building. Awards, grants, trips to Moscow, bylines in Yunarmia-affiliated publications, and mural honors function as external validation that deepens internal commitment. Each credential makes the participant a more invested participant. Public identity is a sunk cost that people protect — the propagandist who has a grant and a publication record is not reviewing their beliefs; they are protecting their biography.

Peer Network Lock-In. The program gives participants a peer group of other young correspondents, mentors in Russian state media, and a national community of practice. Leaving means leaving that network. In occupied territories where social networks are already disrupted by displacement and fear, this is not a trivial cost.

Long-Horizon Pipeline Construction. The program’s payoff is not the content produced by seventeen-year-olds in 2025. It is the media professionals, communicators, and educators those seventeen-year-olds will become. The investment is in human infrastructure rather than content output — a durable capacity for propaganda production that does not require centralized coordination because it has been internalized as identity.

Targeted Structural Vulnerability. The program concentrates in regions where Russian authority is enforced and alternative institutions are suppressed. Populations with fewer alternatives, greater dependence on occupying-power institutions, and reduced access to contrary information are more susceptible to identity capture. Yunkor is not deployed uniformly — it is deployed where the structural preconditions for its success already exist.

What the Program Is

Kateryna’s story is visible to us because the OCCRP investigation found her publicly produced videos, traced her trajectory over time, and documented what the program made of her.

What is not visible is the count of how many parallel trajectories the program has produced. The 5,000 total participants since 2017 is a floor, not a ceiling — enrollment data from occupied territories is not transparent. The 140 active members in occupied Ukraine in 2023–2024 is a snapshot, not a total.

Russia’s information environment in occupied Ukraine is not primarily maintained by what Yunkor participants produce today. It is partly maintained by the fact that these participants are there — that the program functions as evidence that Russian institutions deliver journalism training, career development, community, recognition — in ways that no competing institution currently offers.

The content is the visible output. The invisible output is a generation of people for whom Russian media frameworks are not foreign impositions but career infrastructure, peer networks, and biographical facts.

Yunkor is not training correspondents for the current war. It is training correspondents for the next thirty years of information environment management in territories Russia intends to hold. Whether it succeeds depends less on the curriculum and more on how long the occupation lasts, how many Katery-nas the program has time to build, and whether any alternative institution ever reaches these children with something different.

At twelve, she made a video celebrating the Ukrainian language.

The program got there first.

This article is part of Decipon’s Manipulation Breakdowns series, examining specific influence operations through the Influence Tactics Protocol.

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