Children in occupied Ukraine get brainwashing ‘lesson’ on 24 February about Russia ‘liberating’ them
While the rest of Ukraine remembers the victims of three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, children on occupied territory will be listening to propaganda about Russia’s supposed ‘liberation’ and ‘restoration of historical justice’.
The timing can scarcely be called coincidential. Russian leader Vladimir Putin chose to launch Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the day after his country marked the so-called ‘day of the defender of the fatherland’. Brainwashing measures began almost immediately, with instructions sent to schools in Russia and occupied Crimea on presenting Russia’s full-scale invasion as ‘self-defence’ and ‘a peace-keeping operation’. By the beginning of the new school year, weekly brainwashing sessions had been imposed on all schools and institutes under the euphemistic title ‘conversations about important things’. Although the first time that the brainwashing seeion falls on the anniversary, this will be the third ‘conversation about important things’ which the aggressor state will use to claim a logical connection between honouring ‘defenders of the fatherland’ and glorifying invading Russian forces which committed grave war crimes on Ukrainian territory.
Russia encountered considerable resistance, especially in occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, and needed to use threats and coerion to force parents to send their children to occupation schools. Children are under constant surveillance with telephones regularly checked for evidence that the children are studying according to the Ukrainian curriculum, or accessing Ukrainian websites.
Moscow is also spending astronomical amounts on propaganda and brianwashing measures. Many of the lies regurgitated in the material for children and instructions to teachers for the ‘conversation’ on 24 February have been repeatedly proven false. There was no ‘genocide’ or even persecution of Russian-speakers, and the suggestion that Ukraine was somehow led by “Nazis” from 2014 has been roundly condemned by Ukrainian Jewish leaders.
This does not stop Moscow, which simply repeats them again. It is frustrating that some of the propaganda lines have recently been heard from the new US administration, as there are no obstacles to simple fact-checking in the USA. The same is not true of occupied territory where the aggressor state has imposed an information vacuum through strict censorship and methods of repression, including enforced disappearances and long terms of imprisonment against those who refuse to be silenced. The children exposed to the propaganda in weekly ‘conversations about important things’ may not know that they are being fed lies. If they do, and write the truth in their schoolwork, they will, at very least, fail their exams. At worst, they could be arrested on fabricated charges.
Some of the material prepared for 24 February is eerily similar to Soviet propaganda, just with new lies added to the old narative and specific manipulation of the facts. In occupied parts of Kherson oblast, for example, a video will be showed to schoolchildren pushing a false narrative about Kherson’s supposedly Russian roots and past. The video is for junior grades, with the children presumably discouraged from asking pertinent questions such as why it is called ‘the history of Kherson’, given that Kherson was liberated on 11 November 2022. The regional centre of Kherson oblast remains under government control, with this ignored in both propaganda, and in Putin’s revamped ‘Russian constitution’. The video falsely asserts that the Ukrainian authorities disoolved Russian schools, tried to ban the Russian language and claims that the process of decommunization, involving the removal of monuments to Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet leaders constituted ‘the rewriting of history’. It is, in fact, such videos and school propaganda that do this, with the video falsely claiming that the Russian forces “entered the city, not meeting any opposition”. There were huge crowds, under Ukrainian flags, in Kherson, Melitopol, and other cities that Russian forces seized, with these stopping only when the invaders began opening fire at peaceful demonstrators, as well as abducting, torturing and sometimes killing activists.
One of the key lies in all such material concerns the so-called ‘referendums’ at gunpoint staged, without the presence of any reliable observors or independent media, at the end of September 2022. Russia claimed, and now repeats, that there was near 100% support for ‘joining Russia’, a lie vividly debunked by the photos and videos shown around the world of Kherson residents rejoicing when the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated Kherson on 11 November.
It is also sinsister that Russia is so openly pushing this line given that it is not currently occupying Kherson, yet it is hardly surprising. . Russia’s new ‘constitution’ claims as ‘Russian’ four Ukrainian oblasts, as well as Crimea, including those parts that it does not occupy. It is disingenuous to pretend that any ‘ceasefire’ supposedly agreed with Russia would be anything but an opportunity for the latter to build up military strengh while it is making even present territorial demands so very clear.
A ‘lesson plan for grades 5 to 9’ in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia oblast begins by talking about the liberation of Melitopol from Nazi occupation, then goes on to claim that there was a “return of Nazism” in Ukraine from 2014 until the beginning of what Russia euphemistically calls its ‘special military operation’ [i.e. its full-scale invasion of Ukraine]. The children are not to know, and are obviously not told, that these lies were condemned as especially cynical and manipulative by Ukrainian Jewish leaders both in 2014, and in 2022. Instead, they are told that “26 and 27 February [2022] are are the historic date of the cities of Melitopol and Berdiansk from nazis in modern history. The cities were cleansed of the tyranny of the Kyiv regime after 30 years of oppression and decay” It is, in fact, clear from the later paragraphs that here, and throughout such brainwashing guides, ‘nazis’ and ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ are used as synonyms. The material for both occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts pushes the term ‘Novorossiya’ which Russia is using to try to claim that the oblasts have their ‘roots’ in Russia.
Teachers are also supposed to tell the children about so-called ‘heroes’ of Russia’s supposed ‘special military operation’, as well as about Ukrainian traitors, such as war criminal Oleksandr Zakharchenko, who openly boasted of razing a Ukrainian village to the ground, Artem Zhoha; Kyrylo Stremousov and Leonid Pasechnyk. Zakharchenko and Pasechnyk were installed as ‘leaders’ of the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics’ after a Russian BUK missile launcher downed Malaysian airliner MH17 on 17 July 2014, and the Kremlin decided to remove the Russians in charge of these supposed ‘republics’. Zakharchenko was killed in August 2018, with one of the key Russian leaders of ‘DPR’ having openly suggested that he was killed on orders from Moscow. The same is likely true of several other Russian or Russian-controlled war chiefs (such as ‘Motorola’ / Arsen Pavlov and Alexei Mozgooy / Oleksiy Mozhovyy), with the Kremlin’s part in their assassination in no way prevented them later being made part of the Russian mythology around its invasion of Ukraine.
All of this is aimed at justifying, even glorifying Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Russia is not just trying to deceive children in occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk; Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, as well as Crimea, into believing that Russia’s full-scale invasion, its bombing of Ukrainian cities and murdering of thousands of Ukrainian citizens, including many children, were about the so-called ‘reinstatement of historical justice’. It wants to brainwash them into believing that they are ‘Russian’ and into wanting them to ‘defend’ the aggressor state.
Examples provided by the independent website Agenstvo, with even more, unfortunately, available on the official ‘conversations about important things’ site.
See also:
Toddlers in occupied Ukraine forced to draw ‘thank you’ cards to Russian invaders
Ukraine ‘began the war against Russia’ in Moscow’s official school history textbook