Pupils are being forced to learn a Russian curriculum and undergo military training. Some have found a way out
Tom Ball
October 18, 2024
The Times
Denunciation came quite literally in the form of a pointed finger when one of Ivan’s schoolmates stood up in class and informed their teacher that the teenager secretly harboured pro-Ukrainian sympathies.
A few days later, Russian soldiers came to his home in the occupied Luhansk region and turned it upside down. They found what they were looking for: a Ukrainian literature textbook. The book was taken away and the family were told that if “Ukrainian items” were found again at the house, they would be evicted.
Now Ivan, 17, his mother and five siblings live in Poltava, a city in central Ukraine, after choosing to undertake the perilous journey back to Ukrainian-held territory rather than go on living under Russian occupation. “On the bus after we had crossed the border, there was Ukrainian music playing over the radio and people were freely speaking our language without fear,” said Ivan. “I was bursting with happiness.”
The war may not be over, but Russia is determinedly pursuing a programme of “integration” of the Ukrainian territories that it captured in the first year of the war: parts of the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which collectively the Kremlin terms Novorossiya, a tsarist term for southern and eastern Ukraine.
To do so, it is using a combination of coercion and indoctrination. In the case of the former there have been multiple reports of brutality towards Ukrainians who refuse to comply with the occupiers’ demands.
An enforced citizenship drive is also currently under way, which means that from January 1, 2025, all those who have refused to accept a Russian passport will be deemed a foreign citizen or stateless person, exposing them to the threat of deportation, prison sentences and a loss of property rights.
Far more insidious, but no less harmful, are its attempts to brainwash the more than 1.5 million Ukrainian children living under occupation.
In Ivan’s village, the first thing that the occupiers did after taking control of the local governance structures was to get the school up and running after it had been closed for some weeks following the invasion.
All Ukrainian school books were banned and the Russian state curriculum was imposed, and each Monday morning would begin with the singing of the Russian national anthem.
With most of the original teachers having either fled or refused to co-operate, soon teachers from Russia began arriving. A man brought over to teach history told them that the war was a “consequence of US aggression” and that Ukraine was not a nation but an idea “dreamed up by Lenin”, said Ivan, whom The Times is not naming due to the fact his father remains in Russian-held Ukraine.
All the while, though, Ivan had been secretly logging in to online lessons run by his former teachers who had fled shortly after the Russians captured their village. The classes, which ran after school until 9pm, were a continuation of the Ukrainian curriculum he had been learning before the invasion.
There are more than 60,000 living in occupied areas who continue to study in Ukrainian secondary education institutions remotely, according to the ministry of education.
As well as looking to head off the likelihood of many young Ukrainians becoming the next generation of freedom fighters, Russia’s desire to exert ideological control over the young is just as much an attempt to deepen its pool of potential soldiers of the future, said Ian Garner, author of Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth.
Since Putin took power in 1999, the Russian state curriculum has become increasingly militarised and now includes weekly classes in battlefield manoeuvres, military signals, and first aid for combat situations as part of the “life safety” course that is mandated in schools across Russia.
From the beginning of this year, children in occupied areas have been enlisted into Movement of the First, a youth organisation set up in 2022 that is modelled on the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers.
This summer, children who signed up to the organisation in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region were taken to a summer camp in Berdyansk, where they spent the week being given military instruction and enacting a war game called Zarnitsa 2.0, the original of which was created for the Young Pioneers.
Pictures published on Telegram by the Zaporizhzhia branch of Movement of the First show children dressed in military uniform firing rifles and assembling Kalashnikovs.
Last month, at the start of the academic year, parents of boys aged 17 and 18 in occupied parts of the Zaporizhzhia region were sent letters, seen by The Times, telling them to provide copies of their son’s passports, birth certificates and medical records as part of registration for conscription.
Stanislav Zakharevych is the mayor of the Sofiivka rural community in occupied Zaporizhzhia, where the letters were sent out. He fled to Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia but continues to communicate with and support his constituents in the occupied territory. He said that the children were “living in fear” but continued to make small acts of defiance such as spraying graffiti saying: “Glory to the armed forces of Ukraine” on the walls of the school toilet.
In one video he showed, which was apparently filmed by a pupil inside the classroom of a school in Sofiivka, children are seen daring each other on to see who could shout “glory to Ukraine” the loudest, before the teacher pricks his ears up and bellows at them to stop.
Zakharevych now runs a rehabilitation centre in Zaporizhzhia for children who have managed to leave the occupied areas. The rehabilitation mostly consists of meeting other children who have also lived under Russian rule to talk about their experiences. “It’s about opening up because many of these children are very closed, very nervous when they arrive here,” he said. “The Russians are trying to break them.”
Tom Ball is northern correspondent for The Times, based in Manchester. He covers everything north of the Midlands and up to the borders, including local politics, crime and the environment, and he has also written undercover investigations. Before joining the paper in 2019 he lived in Russia.