Fear, hiding, escape. How Russia is crushing Ukrainian teachers in the occupied territories

Maria's house was broken into when she least expected it. Almost a month after she refused to work according to the Russian school curriculum. She, a primary school teacher, was detained for a week.

In the occupied territories, educators who refuse to make Ukrainian children Russian are a cause for suspicion. Those who maintain pro-Ukrainian views must hide and remain silent. Those who have the courage to secretly teach children Ukrainian should be prepared for imprisonment or forced departure from their homes.

Two teachers tell how Russia made them fear everything Ukrainian, deprived them of their jobs, and kicked them out of their homes.

 

 

Tetyana is from Zaporizhia Oblast. She lived under occupation for two years. She went to the territories controlled by Ukraine.

Since the summer of 2025, she has been working as a choreographer again, where the Ukrainian language is neither a threat nor a punishment for her and her students.

“I am so happy, I can breathe easier!” says Tetyana after several months of working at the post office in a small town in southern Ukraine, where she fled the occupation with her husband and son.

“When I first came to a new choreography class, I looked: it’s not mine, the machine is not mine. Memories of the students, the costumes - everything I left at home come back to me. Nothing, I tell myself, will be mine here either. Although I hope that I won’t be here for long, that I will return home soon,” Tetyana admits.

At the end of May 2022, when the occupation had already begun, when it became impossible to work at the center for children and youth creativity, Tetyana began to secretly teach children dance - online.

“How did I find out that this was not allowed in public? I saw our director - she was white with fear,” the woman recalls. “The Russians said that we would not work the way we wanted - in the Ukrainian language, according to the Ukrainian program. After that, they gave us time so that those who wanted - would stay, those who did not want - would take their things.”

Tetyana wrapped her national costumes in others, threw things from the house over them. She hid her awards and Ukrainian flags. She ran home along the paths, afraid that someone would see her.

The city was teeming with Russian soldiers. They stopped people, looked into the smallest bags, checked things.

At home, Tetyana wrapped some of the flags in foil and put them in a candy box. The rest were in a milk carton: she cut off the bottom and put it inside. That's how it all stood, in the refrigerator.

To avoid suspicion that she still earned a living by teaching, she got a job in a store. From time to time, acquaintances would come there and ask her: "What are you doing here? What a choreographer! What a teacher!". They offered her to work in a kindergarten or return to the center, promising a good salary, emphasizing that the children were still ours.  

 

"And I asked what program they were working on now. I said that I didn't want to put propaganda in their heads," recalls Tetjana. "They play the game 'they passed the mines - they reached their mother', they throw toy bombs. I know many in the city, I know what they teach the children: what is the 'good Russian world', what is the 'bad Ukraine'." At first I said everything I thought, and then I shut up. They warned me several times to be careful, that there were a lot of questions for me. They relayed the words of a colleague who was already in the basement. I don’t even know what happened to her and where she is now.”

Those who, like Tatyana, support pro-Ukrainian views in the occupied territories can be accused of extremism under Russian law. As noted in an analytical report by the Almenda Center for Public Education, extremism in the Russian Federation can include both actual violent acts and expressions of disagreement with the government or a negative assessment of the actions of the authorities or the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Such a substitution of concepts allows the fight against extremism to be used as a tool of repression.

Those who try to preserve their Ukrainian identity in the temporarily occupied territory face penalties, the need to publicly apologize, and being labeled as extremists. For example, in one Crimean village, a mathematics teacher was fined 45,000 rubles (more than $500) for criticizing the war and supporting Ukraine. Another Crimean teacher was fired from her job for singing the Ukrainian anthem and the song “Red Kalina.” In Simferopol, five people aged 17 to 21 were detained for singing Ukrainian songs in the park. Administrative protocols were drawn up against them.

 

Of course, Tetyana did not tell anyone that she continued to teach her students online - in Ukrainian and according to the Ukrainian curriculum.

"My students were everywhere. They all wrote, they were worried and sad. I understood what was threatening me, but I think that if the children remained in the occupied territories and wanted to study, how could I refuse them? I simply had to work. Only in such a way that no one would find out. Because I saw people after the basement. It was difficult to recognize them," the teacher explains.

During online classes, she had to teach quietly, not as she could, not as she wanted, because speaking Ukrainian is scary. The right time also had to be chosen - so that there were people on the street, transport, some sounds. But the city became deserted.

According to the Ministry of Education, as of the beginning of 2025, there were 600,000 Ukrainian school-age children in the territories temporarily occupied by Russia. Seven percent of them studied according to the Ukrainian online education system. The number of such students is decreasing significantly every year. According to the education ombudsman Nadija Leščik, this is due to pressure and threats, danger to the life and health of children and their parents, as well as control of the Internet by the occupation authorities.

Tetjana's lessons lasted up to forty minutes, no more. First, Tetjana showed the movements, and then the children took turns. Dancing on the Internet is not easy - you can't approach, correct the

tilt of the head, slide your foot, you have to learn to manage only words, but in the end they started to get the hang of it.

"I tried to choose music without words, or to be foreign. I told parents and children that our classes are dangerous," explains Tetijana. "But the children knew that. It was in the air - that Ukrainian was not allowed".

Tetjana's son also continued his education in a Ukrainian school during the occupation. He studied secretly and online. He and Tetjana had one laptop, which they hid behind the bathtub liner after Ukrainian lessons. It happened that, frightened by the noises in the entrance, Tetjana would quickly shove her laptop somewhere - once it ended up in the freezer.

 

Russian soldiers often came to Tetyana’s house. So, while she was working, her husband and son were on guard. “You know,” Tetyana says, “fear makes you look out the window all the time.”

So, while her son was in online classes at a Ukrainian school, Tetyana looked out the window.

“Fear was everywhere. In the morning, day and night. Fear when a soldier says: “Why aren’t you going to vote (in the “referendum” - UP)?” When he asks for documents, and you show your Ukrainian passport.

“Why?” - you can ask in different ways. They do it to scare you. They can take you away. Or tear up your passport. Some people have it torn up. And you never know what to expect when they come to you, what they will do. At the end of December 2024, they came to our house,” says Tetyana.

Tetyana was at work in a store. About a dozen soldiers burst into her apartment. They knocked her husband to the floor, not allowing him to raise his head. When he did not answer their question, they beat him.

They talked to her son in the next room. They were polite. They asked why he was not studying at a Russian school. They ordered all family members to come and get their Russian passports tomorrow and threatened to come and check them. Since then, Tetyana’s apartment has been especially quiet.

“We didn’t want to be there anymore. My son didn’t leave the house for weeks. He didn’t sleep at night. He would hear the slightest noise and he would be at the window. Fear. And the Russian passports…”, Tetyana continues.

But she was afraid to leave. She was afraid that they would be detained, that everyone would know about her refusal to work for Russia. However, a few months after the search, with the help of a volunteer organization, Tetjana, her husband and son still dared to leave the home. The family settled in a small Ukrainian town, over which Russian drones often fly.

"But even when they shoot, it's not as scary as at home when a car comes by. Here, thanks to returning to work with children, I'm calm," says Tetjana. "When "Chervona Kalina" plays on my phone and the students sing, it's the best medicine."

 

Maria is from Kherson region. She spent eight months in the occupied territories. She went abroad. (Name changed at the request of the woman).

Maria is teaching Ukrainian children again - her primary school students. Some of them live in Ukraine, some abroad, some - in the occupied territories. That is why she works only online. For months she has been telling children from the occupied territories of Ukraine: do not tell anyone, under any circumstances, that you study in a Ukrainian school. The children, if they have the opportunity to contact them, nod their heads.

Maria misses her school. A quiet life when you go to work, do what you love and return home. This life is gone. There is no more home.

Maria's town has been under occupation since February 2022. During the first two years of occupation, the population of the community to which she belonged tripled. In 2025, the occupation authorities admitted that enterprises lack up to half of their workers. There is no school or kindergarten in the city.

In online classes, Maria reminds some of her students to hide in cases of increased danger: sometimes they don’t notice alarms, sometimes they don’t react to shelling.

And she herself still covers her ears when she hears the noise of ordinary planes. She instinctively presses herself to the ground. Although she has been living in a safe European country for more than two years and does not repeat to herself over and over again: “Calm down, they won’t come for you, they won’t take you away.”

 

How it happened in September 2022. When, as a criminal, she was taken out of her apartment at gunpoint. Could this 50-year-old woman imagine herself in prison?

"I didn't consider myself threatened," Maria admits, recalling the day she was detained in her own apartment. "I'm not a director, I'm not a school administrator - I'm just an ordinary teacher."

That morning, when someone burst into her apartment with a bang, Maria quickly threw her phones under the sofa. That's why Ukrainian news was coming from under the sofa. They had to be turned off immediately.

A month before the raid, Maria was finally kicked out of the school she had entered as a 19-year-old and where she had taught children her whole life. However, after refusing to cooperate with the occupiers, she, like other teachers who had done the same, was ordered to leave the school.

Marija entered the classroom where she had recently taught first graders and began to pack the teaching materials - everything that had Ukrainian symbols. The new school principal warned: what you leave behind will be destroyed.

"Thirty years of my work," Maria thought and dragged her heavy bags across the street to her father's apartment.

"If the Russians found these things, it's a direct route 'to the basement,'" says Maria. Awareness of the danger comes to her only now, although she could feel it as early as the spring of 2022, when the Russians took the director of her school "to the basement". But then Maria had no fear.

Even on that September morning, when seven armed men broke into her house, there was no fear.

"I'm surprised," says Maria. "It was just exasperation: who are you?! What are you doing here?"

In her home clothes, still warm from her sleep, the soldiers pushed her into the corridor. Then they started throwing away all her things. Then they let her change and led her to the car. They took her to the building where she had once received her Ukrainian passport.

Now they were torturing people there.

"They brought me like an ordinary thief: photo - profile, full face, fingerprints. They took me to a room where there was a dirty children's mattress. I lay on it and counted: first, second, third day. I didn't sleep. I would fall asleep for a few hours only when my neighbor gave me a pill.

They fed us once or twice a day, I don't remember. A little porridge, a piece of bread. I think that was all.

 

Sometimes I heard the men who were held in the basement talking. Our director was there again. I burst into tears when I saw him being taken for a walk through the barred window.

"There was heavy shelling, I heard planes coming. Once the guards got so scared that they ran and forgot to lock us up. It was funny. But it was impossible to escape - Russian soldiers were everywhere in the city."

Maria spent almost a week thinking. Why was she being detained? She analyzed every word she said. Because she hadn't kept quiet when the director was first detained? Because she had gone to rallies in support of Ukraine? Or because she had already finished the school year according to the Ukrainian curriculum during the occupation?

That was where fear first gripped her. She was afraid that she would be sent somewhere. That she would disappear for the sake of her loved ones. That she would never be released from prison.

Maria was called in for questioning about a week after her detention. The same man who had taken her from home was sitting in front of her. He asked her many questions. He showed her the principal's Facebook page, screenshots from a school chat room, and a photo of the teacher who was apparently in charge.  

 

“This woman was probably working online at the time, using a Ukrainian program,” Maria guesses. “But I didn’t know her.”

Maria had to admit whether she had worked with children during the occupation. She was persuaded to do so using a Russian school program, “advised” to read Russian books. In the end, she was warned: if she continued to hold on to her beliefs, she would be better off leaving.

Teachers have the right to job security, protection from unfair interference, the right to a safe and well-equipped educational environment, academic and personal freedom in teaching, and the choice of materials without ideological coercion, explains Karim Asfari, a legal analyst at The Reckoning Project, citing international human rights law and the International Labor Organization’s Recommendations on the Status of Teachers.

However, during the occupation, Maria received only a prison sentence and an order to leave.

She was released from prison sick, but she considers herself lucky.

"My phones, which were broadcasting Ukrainian news under the sofa, were not found. By the way, I am not sure that I would have survived. I only woke up to this a month later.

I knew that I would not be able to work in Russia, in a Russian school. So many people were killed, tortured, how many people disappeared in the city, how many were kept in basements. I left.

I read the news, messages, reports: "Died", "Killed", "Arrival", "Wounded". A student in the war. His grandmother is under occupation. My father - I could not even bury him. My nephew disappeared. We looked for him for a whole year. He was imprisoned in Russia. Thank God, he is alive. I still can not sleep," says Maria.

 

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Since 2022, Ukrainian teachers in the occupied territories have been forced to teach according to Russian methods, call the invasion "reunification" and repeat to Ukrainian children that Russia is saving them from the Nazis and NATO. Despite this, some teachers continue to secretly teach according to the Ukrainian curriculum, giving their students a chance to preserve their Ukrainian identity. As long as the war continues, we will not know how many of these brave people remained under occupation, how many were forced to submit to the demands of the Russian Federation, and how many were persecuted for their beliefs.