November 2025. The occupied part of Kherson region. In Skadovsk, the students of School No. 3 were gathered for a “lesson of courage”. The event in the local museum was held by the head of the Skadovsk branch of the Russian organization “Combat Brotherhood” Andrii Dvoretskyi, a former journalist from Mykolaiv who joined Russians in 2014. The Suspilne investigative editorial office has found out more about Andrii Dvoretskyi and the organization “Combat Brotherhood”, which is committing a war crime in the temporarily occupied territories militarizing Ukrainian children.
“Lesson of courage” for Skadovsk children
During the “lesson of courage”, Dvoretskyi showed the schoolchildren 16 photographs from his exhibition “The long way home”.
The photos show the Maidan events in Kyiv, battles for the Donetsk airport, militants, destroyed houses in Donetsk region, as well as the town of Snihurivka, Mykolaiv region, where Dvoretskyi worked in the occupation administration in 2022.
Dvoretskyi held the event for students within one of the projects of the organization “Combat Brotherhood”, the regional branch of which in Skadovsk he heads. The organization’s charter provides for holding “patriotic educational” events for young people, including “lessons of courage”.
Dvoretskyi said to the propaganda publication “Tavria” that his mission during the event was to use the example of Donbas to tell children about the “reasons for the special military operation” (this is what the Russians call the war against Ukraine, – Ed.) and to say that Russia came to the territory of Kherson region “to help”.
Who is Dvoretskyi?
Andrii Dvoretskyi was born in Mykolaiv on April 24, 1981.
In 2001, he finished the vocational school in specialty “industrial equipment electrician”. He began “writing articles” in 2004, when he participated in the election campaign of the “Party of Regions”. He told this to Anton Polovenko, a pro-Russian activist from Mykolaiv, for the article “Olshantsi of the Russian Spring”. It also mentions that until 2014, Dvoretskyi worked as a correspondent for the Kyiv and Mykolaiv publications “Vechirni Visti”, “Kommersant-Ukraine”, “UNIAN”, “Novyny-N”, and “Mykolaivski Novyny”.
In the spring of 2013, the journalists from “Mykolaivski Novyny” participated in the IREX exchange program for journalists, which included a visit to the United States. Kim Luciani, a journalist for the American media outlet “The Augusta Chronicle”, later wrote about the results of the cooperation and his visit to Mykolaiv. We noticed Andrii Dvoretskyi in the photo accompanying his article.
In 2014, Dvoretskyi moved to Donetsk region to “protect the interests of the local population” and joined the “Vostok” battalion, an armed group created in the occupied part of Donetsk region. The commander of “Vostok” was the former commander of the Alpha special unit of the Security Service of Ukraine Department in Donetsk region, Oleksandr Khodakovskyi. He is currently the deputy head of the Russian Guards department in the occupied part of Donetsk region. In February 2025, Putin awarded him the rank of major general.
Andrii Dvoretskyi told about his service in the “Vostok” battalion on his Telegram channel. However, he did not “fight” for long. In the summer of 2014, Dvoretskyi already positioned himself as a “military correspondent” for the separatist channel “Novorossiya TV”.
In the autumn of 2014, Dvoretskyi began to work as a military correspondent for the information service of the political department of the occupation “ministry of defense” of Donetsk region. The Mykolaiv publication “Novyny N” reported that Dvoretskyi participated in the interrogation of a Ukrainian serviceman from Mykolaiv who was captured by militants. At the same time, Dvoretskyi told local propaganda channels about the battles for Donetsk airport.
In 2021, according to the Center for Investigative Journalism, Dvoretskyi became a reconnaissance operator in the reconnaissance platoon of the mortar battery of the 1st rifle battalion of the 100th separate guards motorized brigade of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”.
In 2022, the head of the occupation administration of the Snihurivka district of Mykolaiv region, Yurii Barbashov, offered Dvoretskyi the position of “head of the domestic and foreign policy department”, which, according to the Ukrainian law enforcement, he agreed to.
Before the liberation of Snihurivka in November 2022, Dvoretskyi fled to the temporarily occupied territory of Kherson region, to the town of Skadovsk where he still resides.
In September 2023, Dvoretskyi, presenting himself the head of the domestic and foreign policy department of the occupation Snihurivka administration, actively called for participation in the elections that the occupiers organized for the “Kherson regional duma”. In particular, he expressed the hope that Mykolaiv and Odesa would also fall under the Russian occupation. Dvoretskyi recorded the video against the background of the district house of culture in Skadovsk. To the left of Dvoretskyi, there is a monument to Pushkin, which the occupation authorities installed in June 2023.
The Security Service of Ukraine declared two suspicions against Dvoretskyi: in July 2023 – for collaborative activities, and in April 2024 – for distributing materials calling for changes to the state border of Ukraine.
In May 2025, the Snihurivka District Court of Mykolaiv region sentenced Dvoretskyi in absentia to 12 years in prison with confiscation of property. The sentence entered into force in June 2025.
We were unable to find out when exactly Dvoretskyi became the head of the branch of the “Combat Brotherhood” in Skadovsk. Considering that the regional branch in Kherson region was opened in November 2023, we assume that the district branch has been there for no more than two years.
Dvoretskyi’s activities are not limited to the “Combat Brotherhood”. In one of the recent videos, he is presented as an employee of the administration of the “Skadovsk municipal district”. However, we do not know what his sphere of activity is. There is no information about him on the website of the mentioned occupation administration.
Currently, Dvoretskyi continues to actively maintain his Telegram channel “Call sign Hedgehog”, which he launched in March 2022. On this channel, the former journalist justifies Russia’s war against Ukraine, publishes pseudo-historical news and his own combat memories of the war in Donbas. As of December 2025, the channel had almost 300 subscribers.
Dvoretskyi also gives interviews to pro-Russian publications, in which he spreads low-quality propaganda. For example, in March 2025, in the program “Kherson Evening” he said that residents from western Ukraine were deliberately resettled to the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in order to make these territories Ukrainian. According to him, the same is being done now in Odesa.
In addition to the “lesson of courage” for students of School No. 3 in Skadovsk, the regional branch of the “Combat Brotherhood” headed by Dvoretskyi holds similar events for students of other schools. In particular, in October 2024, Dvoretskyi held a lesson of courage for senior students of School No. 1. In this school, in December 2025, at the initiative of Dvoretskyi’s organization, a “hero’s desk” dedicated to Volodymyr Humanenko, a Soviet soldier and participant in World War II, was opened.
In September 2025, Dvoretskyi, as the head of the “Combat Brotherhood” organization, signed a cooperation agreement with Volodymyr Petrov, the ataman of the Cossack community named after General Matviy Platov,. The community was registered in February 2025 in Skadovsk. Since then, its participants have been actively developing the “Cossack movement” in the occupied part of Kherson region and involving schoolchildren from the occupied territories in various events. The agreement provided for joint activities on “patriotic and spiritual education of youth, including the organization of “courage lessons” and sports competitions”. In addition, in September 2025, a so-called “Cossack class” was opened at school No. 3 in Skadovsk.
During the existence of the regional branch of the “Combat Brotherhood” in Kherson region, its members, as they themselves claim, have conducted over 600 “lessons of courage”.
The leadership of the “Combat Brotherhood” and militarization of children in the occupied territories
“Combat Brotherhood” is a Russian non-profit organization of veterans of local wars and military conflicts. It is the legal successor of the Russian public movement of veterans of local wars and military conflicts “Combat Brotherhood”, which was created in 1997.
The leadership, which is based in Moscow, includes four people. Two of them have an indirect relation to Ukraine: the leader, Boris Gromov, lived and served in Kyiv for a certain time, and Dmytro Sablin is a native of Mariupol.
The website of the “Combat Brotherhood” lists 82-year-old Boris Gromov, a former governor of the Moscow region and current member of the Russian State Duma from the “United Russia” party, as the head of the organization.
The main goal of the organization is to protect the rights of veterans of all wars and services, as well as family members of the deceased. The organization’s website states that its members are implementing five projects related to the “patriotic education of youth”. Within the framework of these projects, the members of the “Combat Brotherhood” organize competitions of art works and drawings, “lessons of courage” in educational institutions, military sports competitions, military-patriotic camps, work with “difficult” teenagers, and field seminars. All of them are connected to Russian propaganda and glorification of participants in military operations.
Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the “Combat Brotherhood” has opened regional offices in the temporarily occupied Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson regions, and Crimea.
In occupied Crimea, the “Combat Brotherhood” is headed by a native of Moscow, Sergey Tarasov. We assume that he came to the territory of Ukraine in the 1970s, when he studied at the Odesa Higher Artillery School. Tarasov served in the Soviet army for 16 years; in particular, from March 1985 to April 1987 he participated in hostilities in Afghanistan, and then worked in the Crimean KGB. According to Tarasov’s biographical information on the website of the occupation publication “Crimea Legal”, after the collapse of the USSR and until 1996, he worked for the Security Service of Ukraine. Later, he worked in the gas sector, and from October 2019, he was the director of “Krymgazmerezhi”. Tarasov is a deputy from the Crimean regional branch of Putin’s party “United Russia”.
In August 2025, the members of the Kerch city branch of the “Combat Brotherhood” organized a military-patriotic tour to the Altai. Together with Russian servicemen who were wounded during the war in Ukraine, they sent there children from the “young scout detachment” from occupied Kerch.
The leader of the “Combat Brotherhood” in the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region is a Russian native of Novosibirsk, Roman Starikov. Before the full-scale invasion, Starikov lived in Crimea for ten years, where he “worked” on issues of patriotic education. Later, he came to Zaporizhzhia region to “help build a peaceful life” and became a member of the defense committee of the so-called legislative assembly of the region.
In December 2025, as part of a “lesson of courage”, the members of the “Combat Brotherhood” demonstrated tactical medicine techniques to ninth-graders from one of the schools.
In Luhansk region, the head of the regional branch of the “Combat Brotherhood” is collaborator Yurii Rezanov, a native of Luhansk. From 2014 to 2022, he fought on the side of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, and later, as a deputy from the political party “United Russia”, he worked as an advisor in the occupation people’s council of the “Luhansk People’s Republic”. In 2024, Rezanov was accused of collaborationism.
In August 2025, the Luhansk “Combat Brotherhood” sent Ukrainian children to Leningrad region of the Russian Federation to participate in the military-patriotic festival “March of Memory”, where the children were introduced to the basics of physical, tactical, and shooting training. During the festival, they wore the uniform of Red Army soldiers and lived in a tent camp.
The leader of the “Combat Brotherhood” in the occupied part of Donetsk region is also a collaborator, Serhii Lukianov, a former international transport driver and later an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 2014, Lukianov participated in the war in Donetsk region on the side of the militants.
In November 2025, the “Combat Brotherhood” together with the Zakharchenko Cadet Corps organized events in schools in the occupied part of Donetsk region, during which weapons, equipment, and means for landing were demonstrated.
The regional branch of the “Combat Brotherhood” in the occupied part of Kherson region is headed by collaborator Ihor Telehin. According to the publication “Most”, in 2020 Telehin worked in the headquarters of the candidate for the position of mayor of Kherson Volodymyr Saldo, where he filmed a video about the “heroic life”. After the start of the full-scale invasion, he switched to the Russian side and headed the department of external relations and internal policy of the occupation administration of Kherson region. In 2023, the Security Service of Ukraine accused Telehin of collaborationism.
In August 2025, the “Combat Brotherhood” led by Telehin organized the “Memory of generations” competition for children from the town of Henichesk. The children were trained in tactical medicine, weapons, shooting, and grenade throwing.
The branches of the “Combat Brotherhood” established in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine actively cooperate with local occupation administrations and educational institutions to militarize children, promote Russian propaganda, and justify Russian aggression.
In the summer of 2016, Ukrainian children from the temporarily occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions were for the first time taken to the “Combat Brotherhood” military-patriotic camp, which operated in Vladimir region of the Russian Federation. “Young men from 14 to 18 years old will live in the barracks for 10 days according to the army schedule. Food, accommodation, and a young fighter’s course from officers of the Kovrov division,” the advertisement of the camp said.
Since then, similar camps have been organized in several other places, including Yevpatoria, Crimea.
The goal of the “Combat Brotherhood” camp is the same as that of the military-patriotic camp in Volgograd, about which we wrote earlier. It is the militarization of children.
Such camps are part of Russia’s policy to eradicate Ukrainian identity in children. In the camp, Ukrainian children undergo a course of disciplines that prepare them for service in the Russian armed forces. In particular, they attend classes in the basics of security, engineering, tactical and fire training, tactical medicine, UAV control and countermeasures, and parachute training.
Propaganda for service in the armed forces of an opposing country is prohibited by Article 51 of the Geneva Convention on the protection of civilian persons in time of war. The militarization of Ukrainian children by Russia is also a gross violation of UN Security Council resolutions, a violation of the UN Convention on the rights of the child, as well as international civil and political rights.
