Parents and educators in the Russian-occupied areas of southern Ukraine say the occupation authorities are using blackmail to compel them to cooperate with pro-Moscow schools being created for the coming academic year.
Sources tell RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that the occupation authorities are telling parents that they could lose their parental rights if they do not acquire Russian passports and send their children to the designated schools.
“Locals don’t want to send their children to these schools, but they are scared,” said Serhiy Shyshkovskiy, a history teacher in the Kherson region. “People are afraid of losing their children and don’t know how to respond to these demands.”
“In the city of Enerhodar (in the northwestern part of the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhya region), there has definitely been pressure on parents and children regarding complying with [Russian] laws for the coming academic year,” said one Enerhodar teacher who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions from the Russians.
The same teacher said the occupation authorities are recruiting teachers and other personnel for the schools they are setting up.
“They are looking for personnel, but I’d like to note the lack of cooperation from our teachers,” she said. “We can be proud of this. They currently have a shortage of teachers. I have been told they have been calling teachers and even visiting their homes.”
As far as she knew, only two teachers had agreed to work in the new schools.
Ukrainian authorities have charged that Moscow is preparing for the long-term occupation or even annexation of the areas of Ukraine that connect the eastern Donbas region, where Russia has fomented a separatist war for the last eight years, and the Ukrainian Black Sea region of Crimea, which Moscow forcibly annexed in 2014.
In an interview with Reuters on July 8, Russia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Andrei Kulin, said it was unlikely Russia would withdraw its forces “from the southern part of Ukraine.”
In late June, the military occupation authorities in the Kherson region announced they were preparing a “referendum” on joining Russia.
On July 4, Moscow appointed an occupation “government” for the Russia-controlled parts of the Kherson region, naming Mikhail Rodikov, a municipal official from the Moscow region, as “education and science minister.”
Rodikov headed the de facto education department of the government in the Crimean city of Sevastopol following Russia’s annexation of the region.
According to Ukrainian investigative journalist Valentyna Samar, Rodikov was involved in several scandals during his 2015-18 tenure in Sevastopol, after one of which he was compelled to resign and return to Russia.
“It is a strange appointment, especially considering that Rodikov is 64 and should retire soon,” Samar said. “But I guess he still has some gunpowder left in him, so he’s coming to Kherson to set up a system of Russian education.”
To the east, in the Black Sea port city of Mariupol, the occupation administration has been sending teachers to Moscow for “certification,” according to Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to the city’s pro-Kyiv mayor. In a July 2 post on Telegram, Andryushchenko said the occupation authorities have otherwise informally banned all teachers from leaving the city.
In May, Ukraine’s then-human rights ombudswoman, Lyudmila Denysova, claimed the occupation administration in Mariupol, which was largely destroyed and depopulated by fierce fighting before being captured by Russian troops in May, had developed plans to “completely Russify education by introducing their standards” in the coming academic year.
Maksym Borodin, a pro-Kyiv member of the Mariupol City Council, told RFE/RL that the Russian educational program was suffused with “propaganda lessons.”
“They directly teach children to hate Ukraine,” Borodin said.
“In so-called ‘history’ lessons, they say that Ukraine is to blame for starting the current war and deny that Russia attacked Ukraine and Mariupol and that it created all this horror.”
Civilians in the occupied areas are particularly vulnerable because Russia has deliberately created an “information vacuum” there, cutting the area off from Ukrainian Internet and cellular-service providers and outside media, said former Ukrainian Education and Science Minister Liliya Hrynevych.
“They often do not have access to the Internet and watch only Russian programming on television,” Hrynevych told RFE/RL. “The children also hear all of this. And then they go to school where the occupiers…completely pollute the educational space with their narratives.
“The longer this happens, the more it infects their consciousness, especially when they do not have adequate true information and are kept in isolation,” she added.
The Russians’ goal, she concluded, is “the destruction of Ukrainian national identity.”
“That is why they immediately started burning books about Ukrainian history,” Hrynevych said. “That is why they have begun interfering in the educational system and destroying our schools.”
According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General’s Office, 1,971 schools have been damaged since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Some 194 of them have been completely destroyed.
