In the city of Melitopol, occupied by Russian troops, a student who spoke Ukrainian at school had a bag put over his head and was driven dozens of kilometers by the authorities to a remote area. Abandoned there, he was forced to walk home alone as punishment. The occupiers have also harassed and threatened parents with detention, heavy fines and losing custody of their children if they didn't enroll them in "Russian" schools or if they made them follow the online Ukrainian curriculum. "They go from house to house to check," confirmed a Ukrainian woman from the occupied Zaporizhzhia region. Some have hidden their offspring in an attempt to escape reprisals.

These intimidating and retaliatory measures have been documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in an in-depth report published on Thursday, June 20, entitled "Ukraine: Forced Russified Education Under Occupation." The document lifts the veil on educational violations committed by the Russian authorities, both in the formerly occupied areas of the Kharkiv region and in those of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk, which are still under Russian occupation.

Ukrainian experts estimate that one million school-age children currently live in Russian-controlled territories, including 458,000 in Crimea alone. According to the education ministry, at the start of the 2023-2024 school year, around 80,000 of them were studying the Ukrainian curriculum online, despite the risk of reprisals. Online education remains very difficult in the occupied areas, however, since Moscow's troops cut off all non-Russian telecommunications providers as soon as they arrived. As for the "Russified" schools, they have very limited classrooms and teaching hours, insufficient staff and often no electricity, as teachers and parents told HRW.

In a sign of the strategic importance of the forced "re-education" of Ukrainian children, the Russian government has allocated 46 billion rubles (around €490 million) to fund "patriotic education" in 2024, including 270 million rubles for the Youth Army – Yunarmia, an organization created by the Russian defense ministry back in 2015 in Russia and now active in Ukraine – which prepares children to join the army and spreads anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

In Ukrainian schools under occupation, the Ukrainian language and curriculum have been suppressed and replaced by the Russian curriculum and language, the NGO found. Children are indoctrinated with Kremlin propaganda. The history textbooks and lessons they are given describe their country under its current government as a "neo-Nazi state" and falsify history to justify the Russian invasion. This is presented as a "special peacekeeping operation" necessary to protect Russia from Western attacks and put an end to a "nightmare of genocide" against "millions" of Russian speakers in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

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