On 6 July 2026, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights transmitted to the delegations of its participating states a certain document: a report on the militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation. Invocation by dozens of states, the unanswered letter to Moscow, the meticulous cataloguing of statutes, the appendix of testimonies, the vocabulary of the Geneva Conventions doing its best to make sense of these horrors.
What we see here is a “system of purposeful design” to quote the authors. Four features: education repurposed as an instrument of state security, the line between classroom and barracks dismantled, and a legal category of extremism broad enough to criminalize language, memory, and culture. We see biopolitics through and through, at its most fast-paced and mobile. The disciplinary mechanisms are clearly at work: the timetable, the curriculum, the population registry, the threshold of the clinic and the school gate.
I want to be careful with this reading. Foucault has no moral vocabulary; he explicitly tried to write histories that did not depend on the register of condemnation, and there is something faintly obscene about reaching for a French philosopher of the 1970s to make sense of what Ukrainian children are living through as of this moment. But the alternative; leaving the report’s own analytic insight, “system of purposeful design,” to sit undertheorized inside a diplomatic note – seems worse. The empirical work is done, we may thank the experts. So let me try now to give their finding some conceptual spine, let us try to understand once again the shape and structure of Russian Biopolitics.
Docile Bodies, Occupied Bodies
Discipline and Punish begins, notoriously, with a public execution and ends, less notoriously, with the sentence that the prison resembles the factory, the school, the barracks, the hospital. Yes, because they are all variations of a single technology aimed at producing what Foucault calls docile bodies: bodies that can be subjected, used, transformed and improved*.* Discipline works by distributing bodies in space, regulating their activity through timetables, imposing exercises that build up gradually, and subjecting everyone to constant, corrective observation. Hierarchical surveillance, normalizing judgment, and the examination: these three procedures, in Foucault’s account, are what turn a population into a set of governable, self-correcting individuals, each of whom eventually ends up internalizing these measures and policing their own conduct.
The weekly compulsory programme “Разговоры о важном”, “Conversations about Important Things”, begins at kindergarten age and continues throughout the entire duration of a child’s schooling. The program was introduced across the Russian Federation in September 2022 and extended into the newly occupied territories at the same time. A timetable of ideological formation as regular as any factory shift. Ukrainian-language instruction was formally abolished by the order of the Ministry of Education that entered into force in December 2025. We are dealing here with the Biopolitics of Erasure through administrative ordinariness: no drama, just a scheduling decision. The new mandatory subject “Fundamentals of Security and Defence of the Homeland,” is compulsory in occupied-territory schools from the 2023-2024 academic year, interestingly, a year before it became a federal subject across Russia. As we can see some programmes are extended from the center to the occupied periphery, while others are shaped inside occupied territories and then introduced nationwide across Russia afterwards. The programme folds weapons handling, drone operation, and tactical medicine directly into the curriculum. The disciplinary exercise: Foucault’s graduated, repeatable, examinable task, now has military competence baked directly into it. The analogy breaks down. Membership in the state youth organization Yunarmiya (Youth Army) functions exactly as Foucault describes the examination functioning. Yunarmiya is an all-Russian movement, founded in 2016 under the Ministry of Defence, that now claims tens of thousands of members recruited specifically in occupied Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. The same is true of attendance at the Voin (Warrior) training centres, a state-funded programme launched in 2023 that expanded to 21 regions across Russia by 2025, including occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Voin’s reach extends well beyond the occupied territories: children from Crimea have in some cases been transported over 6,000 kilometers to facilities deep inside Russia. Both institutions instruct children aged fourteen to eighteen in weapons and drone operation. These structures are the point where power and knowledge intersect: a hierarchy is established. Better cadets get preferential admission to military universities, and the child becomes a case, a file, a body whose progress can be measured and ranked.
It is worth lingering on the examination specifically. Foucault treats it as the disciplinary mechanism par excellence. The examination is the point where a ceremony of power is fused with the form of the experiment, producing both a hierarchy among individuals and a body of knowledge about each one. The Yunarmiya file is the archive through which a child becomes legible to the state as a case with a trajectory, a record of loyalty and competence that follows them toward the university admissions committee and, eventually, the conscription office. Foucault notes that the examination reverses the old economy of visibility: under sovereign power, it was the ruler who had to be seen, magnificently, by the ruled; under disciplinary power, it is the subject who is rendered constantly visible to an authority that need not itself be seen at all. The report’s account of house-to-house visits by law enforcement accompanying school officials, of children monitored for what they post on social media, of teachers whose classroom conduct is checked against the prescribed curriculum, describes exactly this reversed economy: an entire occupied territory rendered legible, case by case, to an apparatus that rarely needs to show its face because the timetable, the register, and the file are doing the watching for it.
Another important Foucauldian moment: We see here at work not just repressive disciplinary power that is built on the negation of Ukrainian identity, but also and simultaneously the productive elements of power that are based on the formation of Russian subjects. The disciplines do not only forbid; they manufacture a certain kind of subject. How effectively Russia can do it is a different question. This is precisely what the report’s legal experts are gesturing toward when they distinguish, in their assessment of coercion, between the structural and the individualized: parents threatened with loss of parental rights for refusing to enroll children in Russian schools, teachers dismissed or detained for declining the curriculum, children forbidden to speak Ukrainian even outside the classroom. The coercion is real and noted, but the report is also describing an apparatus designed so that, ideally, the child eventually performs Russian civic identity without a policeman in the room. Moscow eventually wants the Ukrainian child to want to be Russian. That is the disciplinary ambition in its purest form, and it is why the word architecture is more fitting than policy. An architecture is not enforced from outside on each occasion; it structures the very field within which choices are even conceivable. We are dealing with an infrastructure of power.
From the Barracks to the Border: Passportization as Biopower
Moving from individuals to populations and from discipline to administration, let us take a look at the biopolitical dimension proper.
Passportization is not a new biopolitical technology for Moscow, and the report is unambiguous about how it functions: not a single explicit decree about revoking Ukrainian citizenship, but the systematic conditioning of access to healthcare, education, employment, banking, and freedom of movement on the possession of Russian documents is mentioned throughout. Nobody is marched to a passport office at gunpoint, in the majority of cases; the environment is simply rearranged so that the rational course of action, for a parent who needs to buy medicine or a child who needs to sit an exam, converges on the acquisition of a Russian identity. This is biopolitics through governmentality: no visible coercion, just sheer administration. The governing of a population’s conditions of life, such that self-interest and state interest are made to coincide. Foucault’s account of neoliberal governmentality describes the state as increasingly indifferent to what subjects choose so long as it has successfully engineered the field of choice in advance. The ODIHR report describes something structurally identical, but deployed nonetheless toward an obviously illiberal end: Nationality is almost curated like a consumer identity. National identity is produced through the calculated environment of scarcity and access.
Foucault’s famous dictum, the right to make live and let die, replaces the older sovereign right to take life or let live. Read alongside passportization, the two operations turn out to be a single biopolitical gesture split across a threshold. The deported child is not abandoned to die; she is, on the Russian side of the border, enrolled in precisely that apparatus of making live. Foster placement, adoption, schooling, healthcare, privileges that many only dream of. Except, this proceeds by design through the erasure of her prior identity. The Russian Federation obstructs family reunification and excludes any mechanism for restoring it. The biopolitical population is thus reconstituted by subtraction and addition at once: subtracted from Ukraine’s demographic future, added (nurtured, catalogued, taken care of) to Russia’s. This is why the report is right to treat deportation and curriculum reform as two expressions of one policy rather than as separate procedures: both are technologies for redrawing the boundary of who counts as a person.
And this is the point where “indoctrination” and “militarization”, the two terms of the report’s mandate, treated by ODIHR as inseparable, reveal indeed their common root. Biopolitics treats the problem of the population as resource, a standing-reserve to be managed, cultivated, and crucially for a state at war: mobilized. Conscription is the oldest biopolitical technology: the state’s claim on bodies as a demographic supply for its military apparatus. The report notes that Ukrainian boys in the occupied territories receive pre-conscription notices from age sixteen and are conscripted at eighteen, a pipeline running directly from the Yunarmiya cadet class through the passportized citizenship file to the induction order. Discipline trains the individual body for this eventual use; biopolitics manages the population so that the supply is constantly renewed. The school, the passport office, and the conscription bureau are part of one continuous apparatus, a modulated mold in the Deleuzian sense. The temptation to treat deportation, curriculum reform, and passportization as separate violations, must be resisted. These structures form a single, coordinated system.
The Dispositif and the Enemy Within
We can refer to the multi-institutional coordination as the dispositif. The apparatus, in other words, is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, laws, administrative measures, and architectural forms, unified by a strategic function they come to serve in response to an urgent need. To quote the report again: “a system of purposeful design” intertwining education law, youth policy, family law, citizenship regulation, and anti-extremism legislation. The institutional actors read as an inventory of the dispositif’s heterogeneity: the Ministries of Education and Defence, the federal security services, Rosgvardiya, the youth organizations DOSAAF, which is a Soviet-era paramilitary training body, federally funded and now branching into occupied territory, Dvizheniye Pervykh (Movement of the First) – founded nationwide in May 2022 and reporting over 344,600 members in the occupied territories alone by 2025 – and the Russian Orthodox Church, each contributing at different levels and registers, the pedagogical, military, punitive, spiritual. This results in an octopus-like decentralized system. A rhizome.
The Birth of Biopolitics lectures take a journey through German ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism, and Foucault is careful to underline that governmental reason of this kind operates through infrastructure rather than direct command: the neoliberal state, on his account, does not tell the subject what to want, it arranges the field of incentives so that the subject’s own rational pursuit of interest reliably produces the outcome the state requires. The dispositif described in the ODIHR report inverts the political content of this technique while preserving its form. Where ordoliberal governmentality structures an environment of prices and competition so that self-interested economic actors reproduce a market order without being told to, the Russian legislative architecture structures an environment of documents, school locations, medical access, and legal risk so that self-interested parents and children reproduce a national order without being told to at gunpoint. A mother enrolling her child in a Russian-curriculum school to secure a place in the local clinic’s vaccination programme is exercising exactly the kind of interest-calculation Foucault’s lectures describe; the state has simply pre-arranged the field so that this calculation, honestly and rationally pursued, yields Russification.
The final piece of the apparatus Foucault dismantles in Society Must Be Defended is the idea of state racism: the mechanism that reconciles biopower’s mandate to make live with the sovereign’s older right to take life. Populations can be nurtured and fostered only once they have been split, internally, into a part that belongs to the biological future of the nation and a part that is coded as a threat to be neutralized, contained, or eliminated. Federal Law No. 114-FZ, a Russian federal statute dating to 2002 and long predating the current occupation, is now enforced in newly occupied territory through regional implementation plans. 114-FZ is the anti-extremism legislation the report identifies as criminalizing “discrediting” of the armed forces and the vaguely defined offence of “rehabilitation of Nazism.” This is precisely the caesura at work. Ukrainian identity, language, and historical memory fall under this legal architecture; they are reclassified as a security pathology, a contaminant within the population that the disciplinary-biopolitical apparatus must convert or excise. Within this framework, a child speaking Ukrainian in the schoolyard will be seen as exhibiting a symptom that the whole infrastructure, the curriculum, the youth organization, the passport office, the anti-extremism statute, will seek out and “treat”.
I said at the outset that I wanted to be careful about the limits of this reading. Foucault’s disciplinary and biopolitical analyses were developed to describe how liberal states, like nineteenth-century France, the ordoliberal Federal Republic, the neoliberal United States, govern their own populations through consent-engineering and the structuring of choice rather than domination or visible coercion. There is a risk, in transposing this vocabulary wholesale onto an occupying power’s treatment of children whose nationality it is actively erasing. It is important not to smuggle in an implication that this is somehow softer, more mediated, less violent than it really is. The report accurately emphasizes at every turn that the apparatus is backed at each point by house searches, threatened removal of parental rights, detention of teachers, and mass deportations of at least 20,610 children as of June 2026. Many of them are placed in Russian foster or adoptive families. We are dealing with real violence, psychological and physical. We are dealing with obvious instances of human rights violations.
Foucault was interested in techniques that operate instead of direct force; with Russian biopolitics, force and governmentality are present simultaneously in stratified fields within the same apparatus. Disciplinary training and biopolitical administration running permanently alongside the very real possibility of direct, applied physical force. The OSCE report is a legal document built to establish individual and state responsibility under the Hague Regulations, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the Rome Statute. It names torture, persecution as a crime against humanity, and probable war crimes. A purely Foucauldian redescription, pursued without this qualification, would blunt exactly what the legal register is trying to sharpen: that someone did this, and that someone must be held to account for it. Discipline and biopower explain the shape of a system; they were never meant as a substitute for the vocabulary of culpability, and nothing here should be read as suggesting they could.
There is a second, more internal limit. Foucault’s genealogies are notoriously reluctant to specify what resistance looks like from within the apparatus they describe, and this reluctance becomes almost unbearable when the subjects of the apparatus are children. The disciplines, eventually, or at least in principle, produce subjects capable of self-governance, particular modes of self-care. An emergent relation to one’s own conduct that is never fully exhausted by the institution that drilled it in. The report’s own evidentiary base gestures at exactly this kind of surplus. The report is based on the testimony of young adults who lived through the system as children and can now describe it, and refuse its terms in retrospect. This comes close to parrhesia, courageous speech*.* An act of truth-telling that goes against the very power that shapes the subject. Teachers who refuse to implement the curriculum and are dismissed, detained, or driven from their homes for it are engaging in a comparable refusal. None of this cancels the apparatus described above. But it is worth insisting, against any reading that would let Foucault’s account of docile bodies collapse into a claim about total efficacy, that the ODIHR was able to gather these testimonies, that Ukraine’s own Child Rights Protection Centre in Kyiv has developed a methodology for supporting children who have returned, because clearly the apparatus has not, in fact, produced the seamless compliance it was engineered to produce.
It would be possible to read the ODIHR report as another catalogue of atrocities, and there is a sense in which that is exactly what it is, and exactly what it should be treated as by the states and institutions it addresses. But the report’s own analytic choice was to describe what it found not as scattered abuse but as, and as a Foucauldian I cannot emphasize this enough, “a system of purposeful design”. Despite the shock, we are invited to think structurally, and rightly so. I still think Foucault remains one of the sharpest instruments available for that kind of thought. What Foucault adds is an account of why the architecture works the way it does when it works at all: because it does not rely solely on the threat behind the schoolhouse door, but on redesigning, patiently and administratively, what counts as a normal childhood, a viable family, an available future. The curriculum, the youth organization, the passport, and the conscription notice are not four separate abuses that happen to coincide. They are, as both the lawyers and the philosopher would agree, a single technology for manufacturing the subject. A subject that the state at war needs. Recognizing that continuity is itself a form of resistance, it preserves a memory that the amnesia of the state-apparatus wants to repress.
Слава Україні!
Note: This essay draws on the Report on Violations and Abuses of International Humanitarian, Human Rights and Criminal Law related to Militarization and Indoctrination of Ukrainian Children by the Russian Federation, prepared under the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism by Hervé Ascensio, Elīna Šteinerte, and Stefan Wolff and transmitted by ODIHR on 6 July 2026
The post The Pedagogy of Occupation: Discipline, Biopower, and the Making of the Russian Child in Ukraine appeared first on The Philosophical Salon.
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