After the so-called “referendums” on the accession of the occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions to the Russian Federation, Russia began to systematically strengthen its control over those territories. In March 2024, the UN noted that Russia had created an atmosphere of fear in the TOT (temporarily occupied territories), which manifests itself, in particular, in the process of integrating the educational domain into the Russian system.

At the beginning of the new academic year, the OPORA Civil Network analyzed the processes of transformation of school education in the TOT and imposing of the ideas of the “Russian world” among young people.

How Russia Retrains Teachers in TOT

As noted by human rights organizations, in particular, Human Rights Watch, the Russian occupation authorities demand that children in the TOT must attend Russian schools, otherwise their parents would be deprived of parental rights.

The former Vice Prime Minister of the Russian government (2011-2018) and the so-called “senator for Zaporizhzhia region” Dmitry Rogozin recently noted that local children did not want to attend Russian schools and continued their education online with their Ukrainian teachers who had left the occupation.

The Russian authorities also state that there is a shortage of teachers in the TOT, as many of them have left for the government-controlled areas.

In September 2023, the so-called governor of the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region, Yevhen Balytskyi, emphasized that the occupation authorities regularly check teachers for “neo-Nazi views” and dismiss those who do not support the “Russian world.”

That is why the Zemsky (People’s) Teacher program was introduced in these regions – it encourages employees from Russia to move to the TOT for at least five years. Participants are provided with housing from “state funds” and 2 million rubles in one-time financial assistance.

OPORA has already written about how similar Russian programs are used to change the ethnic composition of the population in the occupied territories and establish the occupation administration.

Teachers who continue to work in the TOT are “retrained”: the Russian Federation regularly conducts special training courses and seminars, primarily for teachers of Russian, History, and Geography. The purpose of such retraining is to unify the educational environment in Russia and the TOT.

In Rostov-on-Don, they even opened a branch of the Ministry of Education Academy of the Russian Federation, where teachers are regularly trained to “correctly” teach the fundamentals of the Russian school curriculum to Ukrainian children.

Similar retraining is being conducted for faculty members, especially in teachers universities. For more effective management of education in the TOT, the Russian Federation Ministry of Education reorganized higher education institutions, having creating separate Azov, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Kherson Pedagogical Universities. Each university was assigned a Russian “supervisor” – a university whose responsibility was to retrain teachers according to Russian standards.

The Don State Technical University (Rostov-on-Don) has become a hub for “advanced training” for teachers from the TOT. In 2023 alone, 4,000 teachers were retrained there. In total, since the beginning of the full-scale war, Russia has “retrained” 9,000 teachers.

Special attention is paid to retraining history and geography teachers. The Russian authorities believe that in Ukraine these particular subjects were taught in “the most incorrect way”. The teaching of “New Geography” and “History of the Russian World” is especially important for the propaganda of Russian imperialism. For example, in the state materials for preparation for the all-Russian exam, students were told that Kherson is a Russian city currently occupied by Ukraine.

In the Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, university professors from the TOT are offered an educational and methodological module “Without Limitation of Time” developed by the “National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation”. This program is focused on the principles of teaching the history of the Second World War and, according to the creators, is intended to “bring Russian culture to places where Russophobia prevails”.

Events of the World War II are one of the central topics of the Kremlin propaganda. In particular, in new Russian history textbooks entire chapters are devoted to “Ukrainian Nazism”, “state Russophobia”, and “reasons why Russia had to start a war against Ukraine and the NATO”.

In the TOT, these topics are studied using a textbook written by Vladimir Medinsky, the Russian representative at the 2022 Ukrainian-Russian talks in Istanbul. In June 2024, the SBU notified Medinsky of suspicion of justifying, recognizing as lawful, denying Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine, and glorifying its participants.

Militarization of Ukrainian Children

Ideological education of children in the TOT is aimed at involving them in the Russian imperial project and attracting new human resources to the Russian army. To do this, the occupiers, as well as elected authorities in the Russian Federation itself, engage children in various cultural and sports events, where militarization takes place.

For example, to get extra points for university admission, teenagers in the occupied territories are encouraged to join the so-called “Movement of the First”.

This organization was created in 2022 under Putin's personal patronage to “promote traditional Russian values”, among other things, in the occupied Ukrainian territories.

In 2024, the Movement of the First was sanctioned by the United States and 27 EU countries for its involvement in the deportation of Ukrainian children, their forced re-education, involvement in “war games”, and teaching children to work with drones and weapons.

The organization's annual budget reaches $19 billion, which is more than the budgets of such Russian regions as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast or Kalmykia. As part of its “volunteer” work, the Movement also engages schoolchildren in collecting humanitarian aid for the Russian military. Particular attention is paid to propaganda events on the history of the “Russian world” and “Russian civilization” that deny the existence of Ukraine.

Moreover, Russia uses the TOT population to replenish its army and even opens Russian military educational institutions here. For example, a branch of the Nakhimov School is planned to open in Mariupol in the autumn of 2024. This practice has been in place since 2014, when a branch of the Nakhimov School was opened in the occupied Crimea on the basis of the seized Ukrainian Naval Academy in the city of Sevastopol.

In June 2024, the occupation authorities of Kherson region announced that cadet classes would be created on the basis of a specialized sports college, and a separate cadet boarding school was planned to be opened in the occupied Skadovsk to prepare children for military service.

According to the so-called “governor” Saldo, “classes for training rocket and space industry personnel” are to start operating in the occupied part of Kherson region in 2025 with the support of the Russian state corporation Roscosmos, which manufactures Sarmat and Topol-M intercontinental missiles, as well as ballistic missiles for submarines. There are also several branches of the “Warrior” military sports training and patriotic education centers in the TOT. These institutions take children from the TOT to Russia to “familiarize them with the work of the Russian national guard” and attend “tours on military equipment”.

Russia also actively employs students labor at military enterprises. Thus, schools in Kazan and cadet corps in Siberia have opened training centers for production and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles. In the summer, student groups from the so-called “DPR” traveled to Tatarstan to work at KAMAZ enterprises producing vehicles for the Russian army.

Legal Assessment of Russia's Actions

In its report published in March 2024, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine noted that Russian authorities require schools in the TOT to report the names of students over the age of 18 who are already considered by the Kremlin to be suitable for conscription into the armed forces.

Ukrainian Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets emphasizes that imposition of a new ideology on children in the occupied territories and militarization of education is a violation of international humanitarian law.

This opinion is also shared by Pavlo Romaniuk, legal advisor to the OPORA Civil Network. According to him, Russians are pursuing a systematic policy of re-educating Ukrainian children through 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 Russian citizens, that is, to change their Ukrainian identity and transfer them to another national (Russian) group, which is a sign of genocide according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and the Rome Statute.

  • In addition, the occupying state’s attempts to change the identity of Ukrainian children violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides for the right to preserve the child's identity, including citizenship (Article 8), and prohibits to absorb the culture, interfere with the manifestation of religion or use of the mother tongue and identity (Article 30).
  • The militarization of education is used to foster in children a desire to voluntarily join the Russian army, which is also a violation of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and is also a war crime. Thus, Article 51 of this Convention provides for an absolute prohibition of any pressure or propaganda aimed at securing voluntary enlistment in the armed forces of the enemy, and Article 8(2)(a)(v) of the Rome Statute classifies the coercion of a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the armed forces of an enemy state as a war crime.
  • Russia is also violating a number of UN General Assembly resolutions by encouraging Russian citizens, including teachers and professors, to move to the occupied territories, which results in a change in the demographic situation in the TOT. In its Resolution “Situation of human rights in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, including the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol” of December 19, 2023, the UN General Assembly called on Russia to stop the policy of coercive changing the demographic structure of the population, including the ethnic one, and to take the necessary measures to stop free migration of citizens of the Russian Federation to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and their settling thereon.

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