Even Ukrainian-controlled territory claimed as ‘Russian’ by aggressor state’s school curriculum

Russia continues to use its ‘education’ system as a means of pushing official lies about its war of aggression".  The sample questions for the ‘Unified State Exam’ show both the myths that school students are obliged to crib, if they want to pass this school-leaving exam, and the fact that Russia is not even trying to conceal the frightening scale of its territorial appetite. 

The independent publication Verstka first drew attention to the sample questions for the 2025 exam, published by Russia’s Federal institute of pedagogical measurements.  In task four of the history exam, students are given names, and are asked to match these to the events given and the time frame involved.  By a process of elimination, the matches for ‘Kherson’ deemed to be ‘correct’ would be “joining the Russian Federation during the period of the special military operation (SMO)” and “the 2020s”.

Russian invaders seized control of Kherson in early March 2022 and occupied it until Ukraine’s Armed Forces liberated it on 11 November 2022.  By then, Russia had held a fake ‘referendum’ at gunpoint and claimed ‘overwhelming support for joining the Russian Federation’.  It had also introduced legislation enabling it to imprison people who, for example, spoke of the jubilation demonstrated by Kherson residents at the arrival of Ukrainian defenders.  It is because of that legislation that very many teachers will either say nothing or repeat the ‘official line’ and falsely claim that the entire ‘Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts joined the Russian Federation’. 

The next question requires students to identify various figures, with the list including Volodymyr Zhoha, a militant commander of one of the armed units fighting in Russia’s proxy ‘Donetsk people’s republic’.

This is the second year that such questions have appeared in the history exam and that Russia is imposing a new standard ‘history textbook’ which has effectively ‘rewritten’ the history of the Soviet period, and totally distorted all events linked with its aggression against Ukraine since the invasion of Crimea in 2014.  The section in that book, first introduced in August 2023, on the aggression, which Russia euphemistically calls a ‘special military operation’ is set on 29 pages.  It purports to present “the reasons and course of the special military operation; the reunification of the Russian Federation and Crimea; as well as the joining the country of new regions.”   No mention is made of the fact that Russia is not occupying all of the territory they are claiming ‘joined’ the Russian Federation.  Nor will you find any information about exhaustively documented crimes committed by the Russian invading forces in Bucha, Mariupol, Izium and other Ukrainian cities.  Examples of the lies can be found here. 

Although history is under political attack, Russia has also removed questions about democracy and civil society from the Unified State Exam social studies curriculum.

School students in both Russia and occupied Ukraine are also being told that Russian fighters, including convicted murderers, rapists, and other criminals who were released to kill in Ukraine, are ‘heroes’. 

In just over two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, at least 408 memorial plaques had been erected, often on schools, to such convicted prisoners who went to Ukraine effectively as mercenaries, being offered money, freedom and a presidential pardon.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin himself, and the Russian military machine, have also actively glorified men, like fighters of the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade believed to have been behind the atrocities in Bucha in 2022,  Russian mercenary and warlord Arsen Pavlov (‘Motorola’) and others.  One of the ‘state honours’ that Putin has issued posthumously was to Ivan Neparatov, who was serving a 25-year sentence for five murders and other crimes when he was offered money and freedom to kill in Ukraine instead.  

Those ‘veterans’ who survive are often invited into schools to tell children “about courage”.  Putin has even called the convicted criminals, mercenaries and others, suspected of war crimes in Ukraine “Russia’s elite”.