Militarization, the "new history" and the "Russian world": what Russia is doing with education in the occupied territories

After the so-called "referendums" on the entry into the Russian Federation of the occupied parts of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, Russia began to systematically strengthen its control over these territories. In March 2024, the UN noted that Russia has created an atmosphere of fear in the temporarily occupied territories, which is manifested, in particular, in the process of integrating the educational process into the Russian system.

At the beginning of the new academic year, the civil network OPORA analyzed the processes of transformation of school education in temporarily occupied territories and instilling ideas of the "Russian world" among young people.

How Russia requalifies teachers for temporarily occupied territories

As noted by human rights organizations, especially Human Rights Watch, the Russian occupation authorities require that children in the temporarily occupied territories must attend Russian schools, otherwise their parents will be deprived of their parental rights.
Former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia (2011-2018) and so-called "Senator from the Zaporizhzhya region" Dmitro Rogozin recently noted that local children do not want to attend Russian schools and have continued their education online with their Ukrainian teachers, who have left the country.
The Russian authorities also state that there is a shortage of teachers in the temporarily occupied territories, as many of them have gone to the territories controlled by Ukraine.
In September 2023, the so-called governor of the occupied part of the Zaporozhye region, Jevhen Balicki, emphasized that the occupation authorities regularly check whether teachers have "neo-Nazi views" and fire those who do not support the "Russian world".
That's why the "Land Teacher" program was introduced in these regions, which encourages workers from Russia to move to the temporarily occupied territories for at least five years. Participants are provided with accommodation from "state funds" and two million rubles of one-time financial assistance.
OPORA has already written about how similar Russian programs are used to change the ethnic composition of the occupied territories and establish an apparatus for managing the occupation.
Teachers who continue to work in the temporarily occupied territories go through "retraining": special courses and seminars are regularly held in the Russian Federation, primarily for teachers of the Russian language, history and geography. The purpose of such retraining is the unification of the educational space in the Russian Federation and in the temporarily occupied territories.
A branch of the Academy of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation has even been opened in Rostov-on-Don, where teachers are regularly trained to "correctly" teach the basics of the Russian school curriculum to Ukrainian children.
A similar retraining is carried out for university teachers, especially pedagogical ones. For more effective management of education in the temporarily occupied territories, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation reorganized higher education institutions, creating separate pedagogical universities of Azov, Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson. Each university was assigned a Russian "curator" - a university whose responsibility was to retrain teachers according to Russian standards.
The Don State Technical University (Rostov-on-Don) became a base for "upgrading" teachers from the temporarily occupied territories. In 2023 alone, 4,000 teachers were retrained here. Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia has "retrained" 9,000 teachers.
Special attention is paid to the retraining of history and geography teachers. Russian authorities believe that these subjects have been "most accurately" studied in Ukraine. The teaching of "new geography" and "history of the Russian world" is especially important for the propaganda of Russian imperialism. Thus, in the state preparatory materials for the all-Russian exam, it was explained to students that Kherson is a Russian city currently occupied by Ukraine.

The Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don offers the educational-methodical module "Without obsolescence" developed by the "National Center of Historical Memory under the President of Russia" for university teachers from temporarily occupied territories. This program focuses on the principles of teaching the history of World War II and, according to the creators, is designed to "bring Russian culture to a place where Russophobia reigns."
The events of the Second World War are one of the central themes of the Kremlin's propaganda. In particular, in the new Russian history textbooks, entire chapters are devoted to "Ukrainian Nazism", "state Russophobia" and "the reasons why Russia had to start a war against Ukraine and NATO".
In the temporarily occupied territories, these topics are studied with the help of textbooks by Volodymyr Medinsky, the representative of the Russian Federation at the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Istanbul in 2022. In June 2024, the SBU informed Medinski about the suspicion of justification, recognition as legitimate, denial of Russian armed aggression against Ukraine, glorification of its participants.

Militarization of Ukrainian children

The ideological education of children in the temporarily occupied territories aims to include them in the Russian imperial project and attract new human resources to the Russian army. To do this, the occupiers, as well as the elected government in the Russian Federation itself, involve children in various cultural and sports events, where militarization takes place.

For example, in order to get extra points for university entrance, teenagers in the occupied territories are recommended to join the so-called "Movement of the First".
This organization was created in 2022 under the personal patronage of Putin to "promote traditional Russian values", including the occupied Ukrainian territories.
In 2024, the "Movement of the First" was sanctioned by the USA and 27 EU countries for participating in the deportation of Ukrainian children, their violent re-education, involvement in "war games", training children to work with drones and weapons.
The annual budget of the organization reaches 19 billion dollars, that is, it exceeds the budgets of such Russian regions as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast or Kalmykia. Also, as part of its "voluntary" work, "Movement" involves schoolchildren in collecting humanitarian aid for the Russian army. Special attention is paid to propaganda activities on the topics of the history of the "Russian world" and "Russian civilization", which deny the existence of Ukraine.
Moreover, Russia uses the population of the temporarily occupied territories to fill its army and even opens Russian military educational institutions here. For example, they plan to open a branch of the Nahimov school in Mariupol in the fall of 2024. This practice has existed since 2014, when a branch of the Nahimov school was opened in occupied Crimea — on the basis of the occupied Ukrainian naval academy in the city of Sevastopol.
In June 2024, the occupying authorities of the Kherson region announced that cadet departments would be formed on the basis of a specialized sports college, and in occupied Skadovsk they plan to open a special cadet boarding school to prepare children for military service.
According to the so-called "governor" Saldo, from 2025 "training classes for personnel of the rocket and space industry" should begin in the occupied part of the Kherson region with the support of the Russian state corporation "Roscosmos", which produces intercontinental missiles "Sarmat" and "Topol- M" and ballistic missiles for submarines. In the temporarily occupied territories there are also several branches of the Centers for Military Sports Training and Patriotic Education "Warrior". These institutions take children from the temporarily occupied territories to Russia to "learn about the work of the Russian Guard" and attend " excursions on military equipment".
Also, in Russia, student work is actively used in military enterprises. Thus, training centers for the production and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles were opened in schools in Kazan and the cadet corps in Siberia. And student detachments from the so-called "DNR" went to Tatarstan in the summer to work at KAMAZ companies, which produce vehicles for the Russian army.

In a legal assessment of Russia's actions, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, in its report published in March 2024, noted that Russian authorities require schools in the temporarily occupied territories to report the names of students over the age of 18 who the Kremlin already considers suitable for recruitment into the armed forces.
Dmytro Lubinets, Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, emphasizes that instilling a new ideology in children in the occupied territories and militarizing education is a violation of international humanitarian law.

Pavlo Romaniuk, legal advisor of the Civil Network OPORA, shares this opinion. According to him, the Russians are implementing a systematic policy of re-educating Ukrainian children with the help of an aggressive policy of Russification and militarization of education in the occupied territories. They are trying to impose on children the perception of themselves as citizens of Russia, that is, to change the Ukrainian identity and transfer them to another national (Russian) group, which according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and the Rome Statute, is a sign of genocide.
In addition, the occupying state's attempt to change the identity of Ukrainian children violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides for the right to preserve the child's identity, especially citizenship (Article 8), and also prohibits the assimilation of culture, mixing by practicing religion or using the mother tongue and identity ( Article 30).

The militarization of education is used to instill in children the desire to voluntarily join the ranks of the Russian army, which is also a violation of the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Population in Time of War and a war crime. Article 51 of this convention foresees an absolute prohibition of any pressure or propaganda aimed at securing voluntary entry into the armed forces of an opposing country, and Article 8(2)(a)(v) of the Rome Statute considers it a war crime to force a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in armed forces of the enemy state.
Also, Russia violates a number of resolutions of the UN General Assembly, encouraging Russian citizens, especially teachers, to move to the occupied territories, which, as a result, changes the demographic situation in the temporarily occupied territories. In the Resolution "Situation with human rights in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, including the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol" dated December 19, 2023, the UN General Assembly called on Russia to stop the policy of violently changing the demographic structure of the population, especially the ethnic one, and to take necessary measures to stop the free migration of citizens of the Russian Federation to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and their resettlement.

Education in temporarily occupied territories has become a tool for Russia to destroy Ukrainian history and culture, so that citizens of our country do not think of themselves as a separate nation from childhood. That is why the return of Ukrainian children in the occupied territories to the Ukrainian-oriented cultural and educational space can become a serious challenge for our country.