For the past year and a half, Moscow has tried to Russify the Ukrainian population under its control. But the ever-resourceful Ukrainians have resisted. Dodging police checks and collaborators, thousands of brave Ukrainian students have continued their school lessons in the Ukrainian curriculum – aided by their Ukrainian teachers in free Ukraine.

Since the Russian invasion and subsequent occupation of 80% of Zaporizhzhia oblast last year, the school system has been overhauled. Previous lessons have been replaced by the Russian curriculum, with lessons emphasising the glory of the Russian ‘motherland’ and designed to inculcate that the Ukrainian province has, in fact, always been an integral part of Russia.

But a number of Ukrainian teachers are fighting back. By evening, over shaky internet connections and under the threat of arrest or worse should they be discovered, Ukrainian students in the occupied territories continue to learn the Ukrainian curriculum, in lessons taught by their erstwhile teachers in Zaporizhzhia city.

Anastasia is one of those teachers. She described to bne IntelliNews the arrest of one of her students, 13-year old Serhii, who was detained (but fortunately quickly released) by Russian police in their native town of Vasilivka, occupied by Russia since last March. She has seen how the war, and imposition of Russian control, has changed the values of her students.

“Before the war, Serhii saw school as an unpleasant thing,” Anastasia said. “He didn’t want to do his lessons. But when the Russians came, he began to understand how valuable the little things he had taken for granted were: the opportunity to go to school, to interact with his friends, to communicate with relatives elsewhere. He became one of the most enthusiastic students we have; one of those little heroes keeping Ukraine alive [in the occupation],” she says.

The uptake from students who remain in the occupied territories has been enormous. Oksana Minikova, a former school principal from Vasilivka who is also now in Zaporizhzhia city, uses the same remote teaching methods for her classes as she had during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the 190 students who remain in Minikova's school in Vasilivka, 132 have agreed to continue their Ukrainian-curriculum studies with her. 

“Most of our students are from those parents who support Ukraine and are waiting for the Ukrainian Armed Forces to liberate them,” Minikova says. “Even from some families, those where the parents support Russia, their children sometimes decide to keep studying the Ukrainian curriculum without them,” she says.

Minikova has samples of her school’s curriculum, showing the tenth-grade syllabus. The lessons emphasise Ukraine’s place in a broader European heritage, with history classes detailing Ukraine’s modern relationship with other European countries. They also discuss the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic that emerged after the collapse of the Russian Empire, before being reconquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921 and incorporated into the Soviet Union.

The nature of the Russian and Ukraine school programmes “could hardly be more different,” according to Anastasia, the Vasylivka teacher.

“In [the Russian] curriculum, Russian propaganda is very aggressive and total,” Anastasia says. “Militarisation dominates life in the occupied territories, and school is no different. They created a paramilitary movement called ‘Young South,’ where they force children to dress in military uniforms and march around the streets. They force the kids to write letters to Russian soldiers [serving in Ukraine], they teach them Ukraine is a Nazi Banderite state that they do not belong to. They lie about everything,” Anastasia says. 

Child deportations

Other exiled Ukrainian officials say that Russian security forces have already deported Ukrainian children, those with parents felt to be sufficiently unreliable politically, to families deep in Russia itself.

Ivan Fedorov is the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, a city of 150,000 deep in Russian-held territory. After initially remaining behind to try to reason with Russian occupants, he was arrested and later traded to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange. He confirmed the deportation of Ukrainian children from Melitopol to other families in Russia.

This trend has been well-documented. Kyiv says that 16,000 Ukrainian children have been sent to Russia since the war’s start, placed in propaganda classes and prevented from speaking Ukrainian. In March, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation”.

Andriy, who also declines to share his last name out of concern for his family in the occupied territories, is another school principal from the town of Chernihivka, deep in Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia oblast. He was there when the Russian tanks rolled in and stayed initially, before resigning a few months later when he saw the Russian curriculum he was to be forced to implement.

“In our Ukrainian schools, we talk about Ukraine’s long history, starting in the 11th century,” Andriy says. “We discuss the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a free people who fought for their independence. In the Russian curriculum, they ignore this: they say that Ukraine was never a real country, that it was just a territory of the Russian Empire, that Ukrainians are not a separate nation. They say that Lenin invented Ukraine and other stupid things,” he says.

Following his refusal to co-operate, Andriy was arrested and threatened with torture if he would not comply with the Russian authorities and teach their curriculum. After his release, he managed to escape to Zaporizhzhia city. His school has been less successful in retaining students for the online curriculum: of the 139 students who remain there, only 36 have taken up the online lessons.

The effects of the occupation curriculum may not yet be obvious, but they soon will be. In regions of Ukraine occupied since 2014 (Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk), the educational system has raised a generation of children to be completely disconnected from their home country.

According to a report by the Ukrainian outlet Hromadkse, roughly 8,000 children a year have graduated from the ‘Donetsk/Luhansk People’s Republics’ school systems. The report describes a generation of Ukrainian children raised on Russian textbooks, with the effect that some are even unaware that Donbas had even been part of Ukraine to begin with.

The threat of arrest and persecution, meanwhile, hangs constantly over the heads of those in the occupied territories if they are found to be involved in the Ukrainian lessons.

“Parents with school-age children have told me many times about how [Russian] soldiers will often come to their flats, looking for any evidence that they are in contact with those in free Ukraine, including Ukrainian school,” Anastasia says. “They were threatened that if their children do not attend Russian school, [the children] will be taken away from their parents and sent elsewhere,” she says.

Even avoiding this fate, the mental health of Ukrainian children in the occupied territories is still severely affected, Anastasia says.

“The psychological effect of being forced into this propaganda environment is very difficult [for the children,” Anastasia says. “Russia also cannot find enough teachers [to collaborate] with them, so there are hardly any lessons. Often the kids will have just two or three lessons a day, and then be sent home at noon. They are effectively barely attending school at all now,” she says.

The school year is now over, and the students in occupied territory will have to wait for September for their classes to resume. The hope, for Andriy, Anastasia and all the others, is that the new school year, or at least part of it, will be not online, but in person – when Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive finally liberates them from over a year of Russian occupation.