Schoolchildren in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine are being taught “lies” in compulsory history lessons as the Kremlin faces accusations of seeking to “brainwash” a generation of young Ukrainians.
The move to impose a new Russian curriculum in schools controlled by Moscow-appointed administrators has been accompanied by intimidation of teachers and threats in some places to remove children from their parents if they refuse to send them to school for the new academic year, which began last week.
Kyiv claims the crackdown has led to an exodus of young families from occupied southern Ukraine, with up to 500 people a day crossing back out of Russian-held territory.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to manipulate historic facts to suit his bellicose narrative that the notion of a separate Ukrainian state is a falsehood. He last week told an audience of Russian school children that Ukraine’s present leaders had created an “anti-Russian enclave that threatens our country”.
Evidence is now emerging of the “Russification” of the education system in the breakaway Donbas region and occupied areas such as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, with one Ukrainian teacher telling i that children were being “taught to hate their country”.
Dozens of Ukrainian teachers have been sent to Russia in recent months for “training” in the new Russian curriculum while some 200 Russian teachers have signed up to work in occupied Ukraine, in some cases in return for promises of land and new homes.
Iryna, an English teacher from the Zaporizhzhia region, said she had resigned from her role amid evidence that colleagues had been threatened with kidnap and imprisonment if they refused to accept the new curriculum to be taught in Russian and featuring weekly compulsory “patriotic education” lessons teaching the roots of the current conflict from the Kremlin’s perspective.
She told i: “Our children are being brainwashed with a false version of history, a place where Ukraine never even existed. The Russians want us to teach our kids to hate their own country. It is not education, it is propaganda and lies.
“I am fortunate, my role was a temporary one so I did not have to return. But if you are a history or a geography teacher in these days, then your life is extremely difficult. I know many who have left [Ukraine].”
A “manual” provided to schools in the occupied Luhansk region setting out how history is to be taught at the start of the first school year since Russia’s invasion sets out a series of omissions and historical falsehoods aimed at re-casting the origins of the Ukrainian state and pushing blame for the war on to the West and Kyiv’s political leaders.
The outline for the “My History” topic to be taught in occupied areas requires teachers to emphasise that the West “seeks to undermine the unity and stability of the Motherland” while explaining that Russia is at the heart of a single Slavic identity encompassing present-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Among the falsehoods that Ukrainian children are expected to be taught are that Vladimir the Great, a medieval potentate of Viking origins whose power base was in Kyiv, was the “unifier and defender of Russian lands”. In reality, Prince Volodymyr, as he is known in Ukraine, had little or no interest in vast swathes of the territory occupied by modern Russia, including Moscow, which was not founded until after Volodymyr’s death.
The proposed curriculum contains other tropes regularly repeated by Mr Putin and Russian state-controlled media, including the idea that the Communist Party built modern Ukraine and its language while in reality the Soviet Union restricted the use of Ukrainian.
Children are also being taught that “Banderites”, a term used by the Kremlin for Ukraine’s “Nazi” leadership, are to be blamed for turning the country into an “anti-Russia” following “direct pressure from the USA, the EU and Nato”.
More on Russia-Ukraine war
Under plans set out by the Ministry of Education in Moscow, which Mr Putin has made clear he wants to see followed in Russian-held Ukraine, teachers are expected to use new weekly “Talking about what is important” class in patriotism to track the current military campaign and promote the idea that “Russia’s military are heroes”. Among the model answers expected of pupils are responses including: “I am not afraid to die for the Motherland”.
Ukrainian officials in the Kherson region as well as the devastated city of Mariupol confirmed that similar principles had been set out in primary and secondary school teaching plans for the new academic year.
One local education official said: “It is one story only – Ukraine does not exist, we all live in Putin’s Greater Russia now.” Analysis by the BBC of the latest editions of Russian language textbooks provided for teaching in Ukrainian schools found that most references to “Ukraine” and “Kyiv” have been removed, alongside an increase in references to Mr Putin and his achievements.
Experts said the targeting of the education system was an important part of the Kremlin’s strategy of seeking to subsume its territorial gains in Ukraine into the Russian system by various means, including the introduction of the ruble, passports and planned plebiscites on formal annexation.
Professor Alexander Motyl, a Ukraine expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told i: “This is a form of brainwashing. More to the point, it’s central to Putin’s genocidal project of eradicating Ukrainian national identity – either by violence, resettlement, or ideological manipulation.”
The return to lessons at an unspecified number of the 1,300 schools in occupied territory has been accompanied by attempts at a “stick and carrot” approach from Moscow-appointed officials.
Under a Kremlin edict, parents are being offered a one-off payment of 10,000 rubles (£142) in return for their children attending school by Thursday 15 September. At the same time, Russian language social media channels have featured alleged copies of messages sent to parents in some parts of southern Ukraine threatening escalating fines and the implied removal of their children should they refuse to comply.
The Centre for National Resistance, a Ukrainian government agency, said it had evidence of an average of 500 families a week leaving occupied territories in the run-up to the start of the school year. It claimed on Monday that many schools in Russian-held territory were “half full”.