Ukraine, the occupied territories and Russia: the first day of school against a backdrop of war in three shades

In Russia and Ukraine, the bells marking the first day of school ring out in unison, but this shared sound serves merely as a backdrop to two opposing realities. Yesterday in Ukraine, the ‘First Bell’ was celebrated – an annual ceremony marking the start of the school year, accompanied by flowers, balloons and speeches by teachers, children and parents. In the capital, Kyiv, and in other cities that have maintained in-person lessons despite the war, the prevailing sense is that this year will be different; the country will have to adapt to constant changes on the battlefield, which extends far beyond the front line and is targeting civilian life directly. Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attended the opening ceremony to greet some children, and just as singing, the exchange of flowers, and speeches full of good intentions were beginning to liven up the proceedings, the air-raid siren sounded. 

Zelensky, the children, the teachers and the parents moved down to the school’s basement, taking with them blue and yellow balloons, like the flag. The school year begins to the sound of air-raid sirens and with the realisation that attacks will intensify throughout the day; for this reason, many schools have requested a hybrid learning model, with the option, on the most challenging days, to continue with online lessons – there are parts of Ukraine where, from the pandemic to the war, pupils have never returned to the classroom. Until now, Kyiv and most cities not on the front line had tried to keep schools open, as a sign of normality and resilience. Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia – cities very close to the territory occupied by Russia, from where it launches its attacks – have reorganised and started moving lessons underground since the start of the full-scale invasion. Life underground carries on, without windows, cut off from what is happening outside, but with the certainty that nothing will happen there. The Ukrainian curriculum has continued as best it could over the past few years, despite Moscow having, in some cases, even targeted schools and, above all, having declared war on books in the Ukrainian language.

The BBC has estimated that around 12,000 books have been destroyed. Last week, a missile struck a printing works near Kyiv that prints school textbooks, some of which were intended for the school year that has just begun. There is no room for believing that the campaign against libraries, publishing houses, warehouses and printing works is the result of a miscalculation in targeting something nearby. The books are burning not by chance, but because the destruction of Ukrainian-language publications has been part of Putin’s war from the very beginning. When Russia occupies, it erases.

Even in the occupied territories, the bell has rung, and the ceremony marking the start of the school year bears the same name as that used in Moscow – a term which is falling into disuse in Ukraine: ‘Day of Knowledge’. There are more than 1,900 schools in the occupied territories, and some 600,000 pupils have been swallowed up by the Russian education system. The children are Ukrainian; the teachers come from Russia on a mission to Russify the education system, the minds and the customs, and to explain to the pupils that everything they have learnt – the language in which they were taught, the history printed in their old, now-burnt books – is all wrong. What is happening in the occupied territories is a caricature of the regime’s obsessions and absurdities; the grotesqueness that emerges from every line of Moscow’s propaganda in these parts of Ukraine, which are suffocating within the Russian bubble, becomes monstrous – even in the school classrooms, in the uniforms the children are forced to wear, and in the glorification of figures such as Stalin.

The Kremlin knows that future soldiers are shaped in the classroom, and in a country that has not enthusiastically embraced the ‘special military operation’ but has passively supported it, it is necessary to recruit new recruits, harden them and make them malleable for future wars. The Russian school system has become militarised; textbooks focus on rewriting the history of Ukraine, fuelling a sense of hatred and injustice towards the neighbouring ‘usurping’ people. In recent days, the director of the Russian Military Historical Society, Mikhail Myagov, announced the start of work on a new history textbook on Ukraine which will focus on ‘the unity of the ancient Russian people’ and explain how ‘the current regime in Kyiv has reached this point’. The significant detail of the announcement is not the presentation of a new history textbook in which the ‘deviation’ of the Ukrainians is illustrated and the adjective ‘Soviet’ is replaced with ‘Russian’ to present the victories of the Second World War as Moscow’s sole achievement, but the news that this book is intended for school pupils in territories ‘still under the control of the Kyiv regime’. Mjagov did not explain how he intends to distribute the book in free Ukraine, but the project makes it clear that Russia has no intention of ending the war; it wants to continue, through military force and Russification.