Armed Russian soldiers have been used in occupied parts of Kherson oblast to terrorise and threaten parents if they do not send their children to Russian occupation ‘schools’. The raids carried out on the eve of the new school year had nothing to do with concern about the children’s education, with this demonstrated by the checks on parents’ phones for apps for studying according to Ukraine’s curriculum.
Oleksandr Prokudin, Head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, reported the new raids on 6 September. He explained that they had been carried out by collaborators, accompanied by Russian military with machine guns who turned up at the homes of families where there are school-age children. They threatened that the parents would be stripped of their parental rights if the children did not attend Russian occupation ‘schools’ and checked all electronic devices to see if apps had been downloaded for distance learning in Ukrainian schools. It is quite possible that such raids were also carried out in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia oblast where Russia’s aggressive measures to instil its ‘curriculum’ and propaganda in schools also met with resistance from both teachers and students.
Russia’s aim is, as Prokudin noted, to brainwash Ukrainian children, and for this it needs them to attend ‘school’ where the children are told that they are ‘Russian’ and that the invaders ‘liberated’ them. Russia is aggressively trying to eradicate Ukrainian identity and indoctrinate the children with its ‘Russian world’ ideology and false narrative about its aggression against Ukraine. To this end, it has brought in its own ‘textbooks’, and has burned or binned huge stocks of Ukrainian textbooks, as well as works of history, literature, etc. Many of the latter, including works by world-renowned historians, have been banned as ‘extremist’. Children spend entire lessons forced to write ‘letters of gratitude’ to the Russian soldiers invading their country, with reports from occupied Crimea suggesting that children have received lower grades because they did not write such letters.
At least in those parts of Ukraine seized after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the aggressor state has continued to encounter resistance. In October 2023, parents told the Centre for Journalist Investigations (CJI) that the Russians had opened a school in occupied Arkhangelska Sloboda (Kherson oblast), only to close it the following day, since they had been unable to muster up enough teachers, willing to collaborate. The same reluctance by teachers in the Zeleny Pid Rural Hromada to work for the invaders led to a school head being brought in from occupied Crimea for the school in Kostohryzove.
The invaders began threatening to take children from their parents if they did not attend ‘school’ back in 2022. The threat of this is also one of the arsenal of weapons used to foist Russian citizenship, since one parent at least needed to have such citizenship in order to enrol their child.
Moscow appears to understand that such methods of force have not changed the level of inner resistance to the lies and propaganda. It was announced in May 2024 that additional ‘history lessons’ were to be introduced in occupation ‘schools’, with the aim clearly to intensify indoctrination measures which were not going to plan.
