Between 26 August and 2 September, Russian Houses in Belarus handed out 1,500 backpacks to first-year pupils in at least five regions. The action is called “Let’s go! For knowledge”, the backpacks carry a print called “Space friendship”, and independent outlets report the wider brand as “Russia is with you”. The Russian Houses handed them out inside a national campaign that the Belarusian Red Cross runs. The International Federation suspended that society in December 2023 and has not readmitted it.
The rollout
The launch was in a Mahiliou school on 26 August. Homel region and Mozyr followed on the 27th, Hrodna region on the 30th and 31st, Brest on the 31st. On 1 and 2 September the Hrodna Russian House visited a special school, and Minsk schoolchildren went to a city cinema event.
TASS reported on 4 September that more than a thousand pupils had received the backpacks. Reform and Belarusian News put the planned figure at 1,500. Sputnik had announced the handover on 26 August.
This is not a one-off. In May Rossotrudnichestvo gathered all its humanitarian work with children in Belarus into one named project, “Together for a happy childhood”. The August action was its first republic-wide event.
What did not change
It would be easy to describe this as a surge. Our corpus does not support that.
The four Russian House channels in Belarus published 186 documents about children and schooling in the second half of 2024, 415 in 2025 and 297 in the first eight months of 2026. That works out at about 35 a month in each of the three years. The rate is flat.
What changed is the shape. Before, the work came as many separate events: film clubs, book donations, trips to Artek, chess tournaments, literary quizzes. Now it has one name, one national campaign, and one delivery partner.
The volume is the same. The structure is new.
One name, one national campaign, one delivery partner.
The partner
The Belarusian Red Cross has not been a full member of its own movement for nearly three years.
In October 2023 the International Federation’s investigation found that its secretary general, Dmitry Shevtsov, had breached the movement’s Fundamental Principles, misused the emblem and breached the IFRC integrity policy. The findings followed his statements about nuclear weapons and about moving children to Belarus, and his visit to Luhansk and Donetsk. The Federation asked for his dismissal by 30 November 2023.
The society re-elected him instead. On 1 December 2023 the Federation suspended its membership. The society lost its member rights, new IFRC funding stopped, and it can no longer vote or stand at statutory meetings. In the previous year it had received about 1.7 million Swiss francs from the Federation.
The same investigation is worth quoting for what it cleared. It found that another organisation, not the Belarusian Red Cross, led the movement of children from Luhansk and Donetsk, and that IFRC money did not pay for it. The society’s work with children is inside Belarus.
Shevtsov is still secretary general. In December 2025 he said the society has no official contacts with the international Red Cross. In August 2025 state enterprises in Homel region required their workers to fund it.
A society suspended for breaching neutrality is now the channel for a foreign state’s programme.
What this shows and what it does not
The chain is documented at every link: a foreign state agency, a named children’s programme, a national charitable campaign, and schools.
It shows nothing about the children. A backpack is a backpack. Some 87,500 children started school in Belarus this month, so 1,500 backpacks reach under two per cent of them. Reaching a child is not persuading one. The seminar record we wrote about on 1 September made the same point about the state’s own military training: we can measure what is installed, not what is absorbed.
What the chain does show is access. A foreign government reaches Belarusian schools through an organisation that sits outside the oversight of its own movement. Nobody but the state needs to approve that route.
The chain shows access. It shows nothing about the children.
Confidence
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The 1,500 figure is confirmed or corrected by the organisers with a regional breakdown. So far only the total has been published.
“Together for a happy childhood” runs a second national action before the end of the year.
The Belarusian Red Cross is readmitted to the IFRC, or the Federation restates the suspension.
Any Belarusian school or education authority declines to host the initiative, which none has publicly done.
Method and limits
Counts come from our corpus for 1 July 2024 to 9 September 2026. They match documents about schooling, first-year pupils, backpacks, Russian Houses, Rossotrudnichestvo or the Red Cross, with a Belarusian context in the same passage. Russian House channels here means the four regional Telegram channels in Minsk, Homel, Hrodna and Brest. No source was excluded from this run.
The 1,500 figure is the organisers’ own. TASS reported more than a thousand actually handed over. We have not seen a breakdown by school or region, so our count of regions is a floor, drawn from what the channels themselves reported.
The IFRC findings and the suspension come from the Federation’s own statements of October and December 2023. Whether the arrangement described here breaches any rule of the movement is a question for the movement, and we do not answer it.