"We can't start the learning process because of you." How the occupiers have (dis)organised education for Ukrainian children in occupation

"Because of people like you, we can’t start the teaching and learning process in the new regions of Russia properly. You have scared off teachers, parents and children. As long as you are here, the school won’t work properly. So we're going to deport you." 

These words were spoken by an FSB officer to Anatolii Kotenko, the headteacher of a school in Oleksiivka in the occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a few hours before his illegal expulsion in April 2024.

After that, the headteacher said, six teachers arrived to teach at the school. Almost a year later, at the end of January 2025, the Russians expelled Serhii Serdiuk, another headteacher from the neighbouring village of Komysh-Zoria, giving the same reasons for his deportation.

Both headteachers had refused to cooperate with the Russians, who immediately upon their arrival in the spring of 2022 had hung Russian flags on the school buildings in place of the Ukrainian ones and attempted to organise teaching and learning according to Russian standards. 

They took the keys to the schools away from the headteachers, made them return all the computer equipment that teachers had taken home, and forced them to assemble the teaching staff to meet with the occupiers. Once Kotenko was almost shot dead on suspicion of collaborating with the Ukrainian authorities.

"On 14 September 2022, masked men with assault rifles came again. They started checking the computers. They found nothing. They told me to give them my email password, and my accountant had it. They put me in a car and took me to the steppe 10 km away from the village. They stopped. ‘Answer me, why shouldn’t we shoot you?’, ‘Why shouldn’t we shoot you?’, ’You are cooperating [with Ukraine]. Donbas was bombed because of people like you. I shot people like you in Donbas.’ But they let me go." Kotenko had to walk home from there.

The headteachers’ expulsion did nothing to improve the level of education in the Russian schools that had opened in the region. Unqualified and under-qualified teachers continue to teach there, and children do not receive an adequate level of education. There is a lack of physics and maths teachers, for example.

"An older pupil teaches lessons for younger pupils"

The overwhelming majority of teachers in Ukrainian schools did not agree to cooperate with the Russians, and the new staff are not always capable of teaching the material. According to local headteachers, sometimes they even ask high school students to help.

The Russians were unable to reopen the school in Komysh-Zoria because the premises had been badly damaged, so in the 2022-2023 school year, parents were forced to send their children to schools in neighbouring villages. One of them still has no maths or physics teachers. 

In addition, senior teachers at the occupation school have no qualms about using high school students to teach lessons. "A high school student teaches a lesson to junior high school students. Or the lessons simply do not take place," Serdiuk said.

Ukrainian textbooks were destroyed by the occupiers. The new teachers teach students from notes or the handful of Russian-language textbooks brought in from Russian cities that have taken over the newly occupied regions. There is still a shortage of textbooks. Children are taught only Russian. Ukrainian is taught as an optional language.

"Parents realise that their children are not learning, that they are not getting the knowledge they would like them to have at school. Parents themselves, who are worried about their children's future, say their children are becoming stupider because they aren’t receiving proper explanations of the material. Or if they are, it’s like this, read out from a piece of paper," Serdiuk said.

Kotenko said the Russians also destroyed the Oleksiivka school’s archive, which contained the school records. "If any of the students need to restore their grade records, that will no longer be possible," Kotenko explained. Employment documents have also been destroyed, making it impossible to pay pensions to some employees under occupation.

"It is true that there is a shortage of teachers. But it should be noted that the Russian Federation is focusing on ensuring that there are deputy headteacher positions for ideological education. That is, the people responsible for conducting ideological activities. Children’s learning and overall development is not a priority at all. They need to produce ideologically motivated soldiers who have zero critical thinking skills and no questions about why Russia has deemed a particular state to be the enemy," explained Vira Yastrebova, director of the Eastern Human Rights Group.

Carrot and stick

In the summer of 2022, the district commandant and his henchmen posted notices around Oleksiivka saying that a school and a kindergarten would be opening in the village in September. Parents who did not send their children to the new institutions were threatened with fines and inspections by social services.

Headteachers say that in the first year, around half of the children who remained under occupation went to occupation schools. Parents who refused to send their children to school were indeed visited by representatives of social services, accompanied by armed soldiers, and forced to send them. Eventually, under pressure like this, by the 2024-2025 school year, all the children who remained under occupation were attending Russian schools.

But the Russians didn’t just use a stick in the form of threats to parents. They also employed a carrot in the form of various financial incentives. According to eyewitnesses interviewed by The Reckoning Project, in order to encourage children to study at Russian schools, the Russians made major repairs to the premises of some educational institutions and offered parents money in return for sending their children to school.

"In principle, no one was forced to go to school with sticks. But they’d lure us in," said Olena (name changed for privacy), a teacher from occupied Donetsk Oblast. "When I was there, they collected documents. Those who sent their children to school would be rewarded with 10,000 roubles (about US$120)." Olena did not cooperate with the Russians; she witnessed this happening in one of the schools in the spring of 2022. Later, she moved to the government-controlled territory of Ukraine.

"You are living in this territory illegally"

After both the headteachers refused to cooperate with the Russians, representatives of the occupying power structures began to visit them on a regular basis. According to the teachers, they never introduced themselves. They carried weapons and almost always wore balaclavas. In the course of these visits, the security forces took their Ukrainian passports and mobile phones away from Kotenko, Serdiuk and their families. This happened to Kotenko in August 2023, and to Serdiuk in December of the same year.

Subsequently, on 16 April 2024, the Kotenkos were visited by the security forces again. Once again, without introducing themselves, they presented them with a document from the occupation migration service claiming that the couple had "committed an administrative offence – illegally entering the territory of the Russian Federation". They gave them an hour to pack their belongings.

"I said: ‘What? I've lived here for 61 years!’ – ‘Do you have a passport?’ – ‘No, I don't.’ – ‘So you entered illegally.’ – ‘You took our passports away!’ – ‘We don't know anything about that. You don't have a passport, so you’re living in this territory illegally.’ Well, it isn’t worth arguing with them. Let's start packing," Kotenko said.

They were taken to Berdiansk in separate cars. 

"They put these black plastic bags with the BMW logo on our heads. So now my wife can’t bring herself to buy a BMW plastic bag in the market," Kotenko explained. 

"They took us to some factory office, where we were held for six days." 

On 22 April, they took the Kotenkos to Melitopol, and from there across the border to Georgia. They forced them to sign a deportation document which stated that they were not allowed to return home for 20 years. They did not give them a copy of the document, saying "You don’t need it."

On 25 January 2025, the Serdiuk family was deported in the same way. Serdiuk said he had tried to leave the occupation on his own, and at one of the border crossing points he was issued with a document stating that he was subject to deportation for 40 years. He said his daughter, who is a student, has been banned from entering the territory of the Russian Federation – in other words, their own home – for 50 years. Recently, Ukrainska Pravda reported that such bans for Ukrainians have become widespread.

It was in Melitopol, before they crossed the border, that the Russians explained to the headteachers that the reason for their deportation was that they were allegedly intimidating teachers and preventing the occupation administration from starting the teaching and learning process.

Fear and greed are opposites of patriotism

There is a shortage of teachers in schools in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, teachers who have left the occupation say. Many Ukrainian teachers refused to cooperate with the Russians in 2022. Many of them have long since left the occupied territories; some remain but do not work in schools.

Oksana (name changed for privacy), a teacher at a school in the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, said that during the two years she was under occupation, she tried to avoid being seen by the Russians. "When they drove up [to the house], I hid. Because life under occupation is not a public life, and it's not what it used to be."

Worried about her safety, she tried to stay at home and not communicate with anyone. But she was found and was asked to cooperate with them. "They didn’t force me physically. In the first few days, when I was walking down the street, they [stopped me], they knew my personal details, and they told me that my holiday was over, that I had to work. I said: ‘I don't want to.’ They said: ‘How will you survive?’ I said: ‘I have a vegetable garden.’ They repeated: ‘You have to work’," the teacher recalled.

Human rights activist Dariia Kasianova, programme director of the international charity SOS Children's Villages Ukraine and chairwoman of the board of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, pointed out: "There is another side to this process, where teachers happily accepted everything that is happening there. Teachers who have cooperated with the occupiers are harming us. Because of them, we cannot take these children out. Now control is the mandate of schools. They are very controlling: if a child doesn’t come to school on the first or second day, why haven’t they attended? If parents want to leave with their children and they come to school to pick up the documents, the school immediately informs the investigative committee. We have had cases where the investigative committee came to see the parents because the school had informed them that the mother had come to collect the child’s documents," Kasianova explained.

In an October 2024 report by Amnesty International, human rights activists noted that teachers in the occupied territories of Ukraine are forced to choose between fleeing their homes and teaching in Russian schools, where students are indoctrinated with Russian propaganda.

"Ukrainian teachers in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine are subjected to threats and bullying to force them to work against their will. They face a stark choice: leave everything behind and flee, or become part of an education system that seeks to indoctrinate children, including by justifying Russia's aggressive war," the report quotes Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, as saying. According to the human rights activists, teachers who were unwilling to cooperate have been threatened by the Russians with unemployment, denial of social support and medical care, and inclusion in so-called blacklists of people who are prohibited from leaving the occupied territories.

Anatolii Kotenko also mentioned these lists. He said that he could not leave the occupation on his own earlier because he had learned from the Russians that he was already on the list of undesirables. "They would not let me out," he explained.

Kotenko said he was proud of his staff, because out of 70 people, only six teachers, a technician and a mechanic agreed to cooperate with the Russians. He smiles at the FSB officer's words, saying, "That's the kind of monster I am." 

"I have come up with a formula that patriotism has several or even many opposites," Kotenko added. "Fear and greed are opposites of patriotism. Teachers who work in an occupied school now, depending on the number of hours they work, receive between RUB 70,000 and 105,000 (about US$830-1,250). People who used to earn UAH 5,000-6,000 (US$120-145) in Ukraine are now getting UAH 30,000-40,000 from Russia. The only area where there is no such growth is in private business. Tractor drivers, milkmaids, pig farmers – they get about one and a half to two times more than what they did in Ukraine. But everyone gets more. That's why there are people there who say: ‘Stop it, we're doing well.’ Their number is growing every day. We need to talk about this in order to understand why many people, including teachers, have agreed to cooperate."

For the occupation administrations, loyalty of the local authorities was a priority, so they hired people who accepted the new regime or recruited teachers from Russia. But given the rather difficult socio-economic situation in the occupied territories since the occupation, few people were willing to work in schools under occupation, despite the high salaries, Yastrebova said.

"What they have no difficulty with is bringing in militants from illegal armed groups for propaganda activities. Children are genuinely being zombified. The priority for the occupation administration is the militarisation of children through the educational component. This ideological component is implanted in general education subjects such as history, defence basics and protection of family. They do this in order to develop the children's attachment to the Russian Federation and uncritical thinking regarding Russia’s actions, and to form a generation that is ideologically loyal to the dictatorial Kremlin regime," Yastrebova explained.

The text was prepared in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers dedicated to documenting, reporting, and collecting evidence for the investigation of war crimes.

Author: Lesia Pyniak
Editing: Iryna Moskaliuk
Reviewing: Teresa Pearce