Russia’s Investigative Committee (IC) is a federal law-enforcement agency tasked with detective work in both military and civilian spheres. Since the earliest phases of the armed conflict in the Donbas in 2014, the IC launched a number of programs for assisting children affected by warfare in eastern Ukraine. As the conflict developed into a full-scale war, the federal bureau started recruiting youths from the region to its cadets corps, sending them to several campuses around Russia. Anna Ryzhkova, a journalist writing for the independent outlet Verstka, has located and interviewed a number of Ukrainian teens who are now enrolled as cadets in these academies. (Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.) What she discovered was a tangle of moral ambiguities and outright violations of the rights of a child. With Verstka’s permission, Meduza has translated this reportage on the life of Ukrainian cadets in Russia’s law-enforcement schools.