Overnight, President Vladimir Putin of Russia had proclaimed a “special military operation” in Ukraine – a full-scale war. Russian troops invaded from the north, south and east encircling and seizing strategic Ukrainian cities and cutting off roads, and Russian artillery bombed Ukrainian military bases and airports.

“It was very scary,” recalled Sophia, whose name has been changed and exact location concealed to protect her identity and the security of her family. “One morning, you wake up and see tanks driving down your street. There is no electricity, no communication because they cut off everything Ukrainian. There are no groceries – grocery shelves are empty, people are nearly fighting for food.”

That day, she did not go to school. She did not go the following days either. Not a single person from her school staff agreed to collaborate with the invaders. But in the end, Sophia and her classmates had to restart their studies in another village. There was no way for her to drop out, she said.

Initially, she wasn’t able to bring herself to care. “I used to come to school with the sense that I was dreaming,” she told Detektor. “I couldn’t believe it was happening – it couldn’t be.”

In September 2022, amid the ongoing invasion, Putin declared that Russia had annexed four Ukrainian administrative regions – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia – proclaimed them a “new” or “historical” region of Russia.

It inevitably had an impact on Sophia’s school.

“All my classmates became either apolitical or pro-Russian. And the teachers kept telling us that the Ukrainians were shooting at us,” she said.

Parents have been threatened with forced separation from their children and deportation if the children do not have Russian documents and do not attend a local school, where they are taught a Russian curriculum.

Russian army soldiers are frequent guests at schools in these occupied territories, and children are encouraged or forced to create handmade gifts or write letters for them, present or listen to reports about them.

There are now classes on how to use weapons and separate military-supervised cadet groups at schools. For older children, there is also the so-called Youth Army, preparing them to serve in the actual armed forces.

The occupying authorities have introduced new procedures and routines for schoolchildren, in which participation is mandatory. Every Monday, students must raise the Russian flag in front of their school and sing the Russian national anthem.

Sophia said that her classmates reported her to teachers when she did not join in the singing. “And there are posters everywhere that Russia is our motherland,” she added. “What motherland?”

Educating ‘new Russians’

Russia occupies about 20 per cent of Ukraine. Moscow’s goal is to make all these very different ‘new regions’ equally loyal – or equally intimidated – and to make them Russian rather than Ukrainian. This is felt, more than anywhere else, in what remains of local education systems in the occupied territories.

“Already from 2022, they started to teach everything in Russian but they still taught Ukrainian,” Sophia recalled. “The next school year, they didn’t teach Ukrainian anymore. The history of Ukraine was replaced by the history of Russia. They burned Ukrainian books. I saw how they brought them out of the school.”

The Ukrainian books were completely replaced by Russian ones, and extracurricular classes were instituted to teach pupils about the Russian ‘motherland’ and to promote the ‘traditional family values”. Classes with names like Bravery Lessons, Family Studies and Conversations about Important Issues were introduced.

Schoolchildren are now shown films about the positive impact of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ and subsequent occupation of their regions. There is also a huge emphasis on Russia’s role in World War II – the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as it is known – with year-round activities dedicated to events from the 1941-45 conflict. Russian propaganda connects these events to the fight against Ukrainian and Western so-called ‘Nazis’, and serves to fuel a cult around ‘heroes’ of the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine.

This indoctrination, which starts from the youngest school age, has proved to be successful, according to Sophia. She recalled how her friends and their younger siblings, one by one, started to express pro-Russian views. Her closest circle shrank to one friend. Her family urged her not to express her views publicly.

“Children believe adults, especially teachers. And when a teacher says that Ukraine has never existed and does not exist, and that Ukrainians are not a nation but something artificially created, and if one repeats this constantly, twisting it, and if it also happens under occupation at gunpoint, sooner or later a child will believe that it is true,” said Myroslava Kharchenko, a lawyer from Save Ukraine charitable fund which works on returning kidnapped and deported Ukrainian children from Russia.

The situation has eroded mutual trust within families, and there have been even efforts to make children report on their parents and reveal if they hold anti-Russian views, said Ukrainian experts interviewed by Detektor. Parents also lie to their own children about their views for the sake of the children’s own safety, eroding trust even further.

“The Russians are bringing up zealots,” commented Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at the Centre for Civic Education Almeda, an NGO that specialises in the issue of the education of Ukrainian children under occupation.

Russian teachers arrive

Among local teachers who stayed when the occupation of Ukrainian territories began, some were real genuine supporters of Russia, while others could not leave and needed money to live. There were also teachers and school principals who were violently forced to go back to work, said Oleh Okhredko. People were detained, tortured, intimidated, and subjected to mock executions, he added.

Teachers in Russia are offered an impressive signing-on bonus and premium wages for relocating to work in Ukraine. Nevertheless, there is a significant lack of staff at schools. Incidences in which a local teacher teaches several subjects, including ones with which they are not familiar, are common – even though many families have left the area and the number of schools has been drastically reduced.

Zaira Pakhrudinova came to the Ukrainian city of Melitopol from the southern Russian republic of Dagestan to teach Russian in September 2022, and soon became a local celebrity back home. She initiated communication between her former students in Russia and her new ones in Melitopol, invited war veterans and current fighters from Dagestan to the school to meet the Ukrainian children, and joined an initiative to make trench candles, small improvised heating devices made from cans, for Russian fighters in Ukraine.

Leaving her three children at home in her village, Pakhrudinova insisted that she went to the occupied part of Ukraine “voluntarily” to pay tribute to Russians and Ukrainians who once went to Dagestan to teach her parents and grandparents Russian. Dagestan is the poorest region in the Russian Federation, and the poorest among all territories controlled by Russia, including all the war-ravaged Ukrainian areas that Russia has claimed to have annexed.

Sophia also noticed a deficit of teachers at her school: “The school I attended also had a shortage of staff because no one wanted to work there, but later, I had a teacher who just needed something to live on,” she recalled.

“On the one hand, she deliberately did not go to work there in the first year [of the occupation], and on the other hand, she forced me to sing the Russian anthem: she threatened that if I did not sing, she would write and submit a character reference against me.”

Hunting for dissenters

School education is mandatory in Russia, as it is in Ukraine. And every pupil now must have Russian documents to attend school. Russia has been carrying out a widespread passportisation campaign against Ukrainians, although its success is not total. Because of this, there’s been a large media campaign warning those Ukrainians who are still avoiding taking Russian passports that from 2025, they will not have any citizens’ rights in their hometowns or villages.

Families of children who do not attend school are visited by local officials or teachers accompanied by armed soldiers. According to Okhredko, there are cases of children avoiding personal communication with each other so as not to reveal their or their parents’ pro-Ukrainian views, and of a high school-aged boy who didn’t leave home for a year to avoid being sent to a Russian school. “We have families whose children haven’t studied at all. They were hiding, moving from place to place,” said Kharchenko from Save Ukraine.

Some pupils attend lessons locally but also study at a Ukrainian school online, but are facing more and more restrictions by the occupation authorities. Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube are banned and blocked in some places. Using a VPN is strongly discouraged. In some areas, residents have no Internet connection whatsoever. Homes are searched and devices are checked for Ukrainian content and contacts.

Access to online material depicting the Ukrainian perspective on the war is clearly a worry for the Russians – and for good reason. Sophia said that initially, she didn’t have a “clear stance” on what was happening, until she looked deeper into what was happening. “I was also influenced by social media. I started coming across videos with Ukrainians explaining what was wrong with Russia,” she said.

As well as heavy-handed repression, the Russians are offering material incentives for conformity. Large families with children of school age can count on social benefits – but only if children have Russian documents and attend Russian schools.

“We were given free food – buns and juice. Children were often invited to [recreation] camps, free of charge, on excursions to Moscow and St Petersburg. They distributed coal and humanitarian aid,” Sophia recalled. “Basically, they were trying to appease people as best they could. Many villagers bought into it: ‘They were so kind– and what did Ukraine give us?’”

There are many opportunities on offer for children, particularly those with leadership skills, like promotion within Russia-wide youth organisations, which are under Russian governmental control. Such schemes appear intended to prepare a new generation to work for the Russian administration in the occupied parts of Ukraine.

“There will always be a hard core of active children who feel the need to accomplish something, but they won’t have a choice about which way to do it – it’ll only be possible within Russian projects. This is a big problem for us,” Okhredko said.

‘No state can prepare for this’

Hanna But had taught biology and German language at an agricultural college in Melitopol for 23 years. When Russian troops occupied the city, she and her daughter Chrystyna, a journalist, joined the resistance. They attended demonstrations, and distributed leaflets and ribbons and stickers in Ukrainian national colours in the city. Then they had to flee. Now Hanna teaches online for a Melitopol college that has been forced to operate outside the city.

From year to year, there are fewer and fewer students from the occupied territories, and many drop out midway through their courses. Hanna said that she tries to be sensitive with children form the occupied territories because she doesn’t know if they are suffering from psychological problems.

“I never force anyone to turn on the camera [in online classes]. I don’t know what [psychological] state the child is in,” she said. “If I ask them a question and there is silence, I do not insist. If I ask them to write in a chat and they don’t – what can I do?”

She explained how some of her students have been affected psychologically by the occupation: “It’s scary when you see flags that are not those of your country all around you, see armed people, hear terrible things at school that are actually about you – that Ukrainians are Nazis, and all the rest.”

Sophia, like many other children in the occupied parts of Ukraine, tried to study online at a Ukrainian school as well. It didn’t go well. The Ukrainian system of online school education is still adapting for cases like Sophia’s – it works mainly for those children who have fled the war and the occupation but would like to continue their studies with their old classmates and teachers, all of whom have also left and dispersed inside and outside Ukraine.

“I managed for about a couple of months. I couldn’t join Zoom lessons because they started at the same time as in my Russian school but I did my homework and sent it to teachers,” Sophia said.

“But I was in a really bad psychological state, I couldn’t study, I was giving up. I could do something once a month, but I did the lot in one go,” she continued. “But I didn’t do everything, and I didn’t do it when I needed to.”

Ukrainian NGOs and officials are developing special programs for students in the occupied parts of Ukraine as well as those who have taken refuge abroad, Okhredko said. There are options for students to study specifically Ukrainian subjects only, such as language and history, as well as individual lessons with Ukrainian teachers, with evening and weekend classes.

But a lot of time has already passed, and it is getting more and more difficult to reach families and children in the occupied areas of Ukraine’s east and south. “[The Russians] block everything it’s possible to block,” Okhredko said.

A major risk for pupils is having the Ukrainian history and geography textbooks for high school, which show the occupied territories as part of Ukraine, not Russia. “From the point of view of Russia, this is an encroachment on its territorial integrity, which is prosecuted as a crime,” Okhredko explained. “Studying at a Ukrainian school means physical danger for both children and their parents.”

Many high school students like Sophia have fled the occupied territories, or are intending to leave in order to study at Ukrainian-controlled universities, or abroad. Sophia is now in Kyiv for her latest school year.

But many families also return to their occupied cities and villages, unable to overcome the feeling of separation and the poverty they have had to endure after fleeing their homes and losing their livelihoods.

“People who fled the occupied territories are often disoriented because of life under constant stress under occupation, they are apathetic, they really need and count on help. Most of them are dreaming of returning to their places and normal life and are living in these dreams,” said Oksana Likarina, a mental health and psychosocial support specialist at the Ukrainian Child Rights Network.

“They do not have a full life, they do not plan anything. It is easy to convince them to come back home if they have relatives there, especially if they met economic hardships here,” Likarina added.

Natalia Mezina, Likarina’s colleague at the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, said that cases of anxiety and social withdrawal among Ukrainian children directly affected by the war and occupation are widespread.

“Many children have been deprived of opportunities to play, sleep, speak freely, and communicate with their peers in a normal way, which are their basic psychological needs,” Mezina said.

“We might be observing the effects of this war for a very, very long time, down the generations.”