How Children in Occupied Ukraine are Being Re-Educated as Russians
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Overnight, President Vladimir Putin of Russia had proclaimed a “special military operation” in Ukraine – a full-scale war. Russian troops invaded from the north, south and east encircling and seizing strategic Ukrainian cities and cutting off roads, and Russian artillery bombed Ukrainian military bases and airports.
“It was very scary,” recalled Sophia, whose name has been changed and exact location concealed to protect her identity and the security of her family. “One morning, you wake up and see tanks driving down your street. There is no electricity, no communication because they cut off everything Ukrainian. There are no groceries – grocery shelves are empty, people are nearly fighting for food.”
That day, she did not go to school. She did not go the following days either. Not a single person from her school staff agreed to collaborate with the invaders. But in the end, Sophia and her classmates had to restart their studies in another village. There was no way for her to drop out, she said.
Initially, she wasn’t able to bring herself to care. “I used to come to school with the sense that I was dreaming,” she told Detektor. “I couldn’t believe it was happening – it couldn’t be.”
In September 2022, amid the ongoing invasion, Putin declared that Russia had annexed four Ukrainian administrative regions – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia – proclaimed them a “new” or “historical” region of Russia.
It inevitably had an impact on Sophia’s school.
“All my classmates became either apolitical or pro-Russian. And the teachers kept telling us that the Ukrainians were shooting at us,” she said.
Parents have been threatened with forced separation from their children and deportation if the children do not have Russian documents and do not attend a local school, where they are taught a Russian curriculum.
Russian army soldiers are frequent guests at schools in these occupied territories, and children are encouraged or forced to create handmade gifts or write letters for them, present or listen to reports about them.
There are now classes on how to use weapons and separate military-supervised cadet groups at schools. For older children, there is also the so-called Youth Army, preparing them to serve in the actual armed forces.
The occupying authorities have introduced new procedures and routines for schoolchildren, in which participation is mandatory. Every Monday, students must raise the Russian flag in front of their school and sing the Russian national anthem.
Sophia said that her classmates reported her to teachers when she did not join in the singing. “And there are posters everywhere that Russia is our motherland,” she added. “What motherland?”
Educating ‘new Russians’
Russia occupies about 20 per cent of Ukraine. Moscow’s goal is to make all these very different ‘new regions’ equally loyal – or equally intimidated – and to make them Russian rather than Ukrainian. This is felt, more than anywhere else, in what remains of local education systems in the occupied territories.
“Already from 2022, they started to teach everything in Russian but they still taught Ukrainian,” Sophia recalled. “The next school year, they didn’t teach Ukrainian anymore. The history of Ukraine was replaced by the history of Russia. They burned Ukrainian books. I saw how they brought them out of the school.”
The Ukrainian books were completely replaced by Russian ones, and extracurricular classes were instituted to teach pupils about the Russian ‘motherland’ and to promote the ‘traditional family values”. Classes with names like Bravery Lessons, Family Studies and Conversations about Important Issues were introduced.
Schoolchildren are now shown films about the positive impact of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ and subsequent occupation of their regions. There is also a huge emphasis on Russia’s role in World War II – the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as it is known – with year-round activities dedicated to events from the 1941-45 conflict. Russian propaganda connects these events to the fight against Ukrainian and Western so-called ‘Nazis’, and serves to fuel a cult around ‘heroes’ of the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine.
This indoctrination, which starts from the youngest school age, has proved to be successful, according to Sophia. She recalled how her friends and their younger siblings, one by one, started to express pro-Russian views. Her closest circle shrank to one friend. Her family urged her not to express her views publicly.
“Children believe adults, especially teachers. And when a teacher says that Ukraine has never existed and does not exist, and that Ukrainians are not a nation but something artificially created, and if one repeats this constantly, twisting it, and if it also happens under occupation at gunpoint, sooner or later a child will believe that it is true,” said Myroslava Kharchenko, a lawyer from Save Ukraine charitable fund which works on returning kidnapped and deported Ukrainian children from Russia.
The situation has eroded mutual trust within families, and there have been even efforts to make children report on their parents and reveal if they hold anti-Russian views, said Ukrainian experts interviewed by Detektor. Parents also lie to their own children about their views for the sake of the children’s own safety, eroding trust even further.
“The Russians are bringing up zealots,” commented Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at the Centre for Civic Education Almeda, an NGO that specialises in the issue of the education of Ukrainian children under occupation.
Russian teachers arrive
Among local teachers who stayed when the occupation of Ukrainian territories began, some were real genuine supporters of Russia, while others could not leave and needed money to live. There were also teachers and school principals who were violently forced to go back to work, said Oleh Okhredko. People were detained, tortured, intimidated, and subjected to mock executions, he added.
Teachers in Russia are offered an impressive signing-on bonus and premium wages for relocating to work in Ukraine. Nevertheless, there is a significant lack of staff at schools. Incidences in which a local teacher teaches several subjects, including ones with which they are not familiar, are common – even though many families have left the area and the number of schools has been drastically reduced.
Zaira Pakhrudinova came to the Ukrainian city of Melitopol from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan to teach Russian in September 2022, and soon became a local celebrity back home. She initiated communication between her former students in Russia and her new ones in Melitopol, invited war veterans and current fighters from Dagestan to the school to meet the Ukrainian children, and joined an initiative to make trench candles, small improvised heating devices made from cans, for Russian fighters in Ukraine.
Leaving her three children at home in her village, Pakhrudinova insisted that she went to the occupied part of Ukraine “voluntarily” to pay tribute to Russians and Ukrainians who once went to Dagestan to teach her parents and grandparents Russian. Dagestan is the poorest region in the Russian Federation, and the poorest among all territories controlled by Russia, including all the war-ravaged Ukrainian areas that Russia has claimed to have annexed.
Sophia also noticed a deficit of teachers at her school: “The school I attended also had a shortage of staff because no one wanted to work there, but later, I had a teacher who just needed something to live on,” she recalled.
“On the one hand, she deliberately did not go to work there in the first year [of the occupation], and on the other hand, she forced me to sing the Russian anthem: she threatened that if I did not sing, she would write and submit a character reference against me.”
Hunting for dissenters