A new school year has started in Ukraine under martial law. Only schools with shelters that meet the safety requirements of the State Emergency Service have accepted students this year.
During her online speech at the Shaping the Future of Learning Now event held on the sidelines of the UN Future Summit, First Lady Olena Zelenska noted that “in Ukraine, the indisputable right of children to education has to be physically protected from Russian aggression.” “That is why we are probably the country with the largest development of online learning in the world today,” the website of the Office of the President of Ukraine quoted the First Lady as saying.
The website https://saveschools.in.ua, which is a resource of the Ministry of Education and Science, documents and provides real-time statistics on destroyed educational institutions. According to their data, as of now, 3798 educational institutions have been affected by bombing and shelling, of which 365 have been completely destroyed.
Russia justifies its attacks on educational institutions in Ukraine by allegedly deploying Ukrainian troops in them. Propagandists are actively using mirroring tactics to hide the crimes of their own army.
Back in 2022, the Russian media outlet Military Observer published an article about the behavior of the Ukrainian army, which mirrored its own crimes in Ukraine:
“The Ukrainian military, whose behavior in this case is not much different from that of representatives of terrorist groups, are trying to hide behind schools, kindergartens, and hospitals to carry out military activities. At the same time, the West is seeing images of “Russian troops hitting civilian objects.” Of course, they keep silent about the fact that these objects are being converted into military targets by the troops of the Kyiv regime.”
Here are some typical examples of how enemy propaganda works.
Lenta in an article on November 13, 2022 about the strike on Mykolaiv:
“The barracks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, built in one of Mykolaiv's schools, were hit by a Russian strike on November 1, along with the personnel. An activist of the Mykolaiv underground told RIA Novosti about it.”
“According to him, 'the military are whining about the hits to the gymnasium building'. This is the First Ukrainian Gymnasium named after Mykola Arkas. The activist also said that in 2014, “a compote called ‘Blood of Russian Babies’ was sold in the canteen at this school,” the propaganda outlet writes.
Tsargrad publication:
“Ukraine has come up with a cunning plan to cover the positions of the Ukrainian military. They will be placed in educational institutions of Zaporizhzhia, including kindergartens. During this period, classes in schools and preschools will resume. This also applies to additional education. This was reported to the RIA Novosti news agency by an official of the security agencies, citing a source in the Armed Forces.”
“Gazeta, citing the Russian Defense Ministry, reports on the placement of weapons by the Ukrainian military in schools in Sloviansk, Pokrovsk and Dnipro.
“According to him, Ukrainian troops built a stronghold in one of the schools in the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, placed sniper positions and large-caliber machine guns on the top floor, and heavy equipment and MLRS in the courtyard. At the same time, they are holding residents of neighboring houses in the school gym “under the pretext of ensuring security”.
The Russian edition of Politikus reports that bombs were used on a Ukrainian university:
“A bomb hit the Armed Forces barracks in the border town of Sumy in the evening. The barracks was located in the building of a local university, which was taken over by the military. As a result of the explosion, the building was partially destroyed.”
Lenta on the air strike on Kharkiv:
“Earlier it became known that the Russian military attacked the militants of the Ukrainian national battalion Azov (recognized as a terrorist organization and banned in Russia), who were hiding in a school in Kharkiv. The attack took place early in the morning on Thursday, September 19.”
Most of the destruction of educational institutions occurred in the frontline and border regions. In the first months of the war, the Russians actively attacked Ukraine's state border from the east, Crimea, and the north with the support of aviation.
Cities were bombed in broad daylight.
The evidence of the Russian army's war crimes against educational institutions in Ukraine was captured by the photographs of Ukrainian documentary filmmakers.
There were battles for the strategically important city of Vasylkiv in the Kyiv region, with Russians trying to seize the airfield, blowing up an oil depot, and the city under constant shelling. On February 27, 2022, a Russian missile destroyed the Vasylkiv Vocational Lyceum.
The siege of Chernihiv and the partial occupation of the region lasted for more than a month. There were frequent low-level air raids over the city.
The Podusivka neighborhood is one of the most affected in Chernihiv. Here, the Russian army bombed two schools at once, dropping bombs from an airplane.
According to TEXTs (in cooperation with the newspaper Vist (Chernihiv)), school No. 18 was home to the city's terrorist defense, which included local residents preparing to defend their city from the invading army, as well as doctors, teachers, and cooks. The exact number of victims is unknown. There were children with their parents in school #21 who miraculously survived.
The village of Makariv, Bucha district, Kyiv region, is among the settlements that suffered from Russian atrocities. For a short time, the occupiers managed to occupy a part of the village, shelling residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
On July 8, 2024, a rocket attack on the Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital destroyed the classroom and library of the Superheroes School educational center located on the hospital's premises. Children who were being treated in the hospital studied there.
The war has literally bombed education in Ukraine. But there is something that cannot be counted, restored, or returned: lost human resources, lost opportunities, and lost time when children cannot study.
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The Russian army is not only destroying Ukrainian schools, it is also turning them into torture chambers. They were found in school buildings in the de-occupied territories.
According to the Chernihiv District State Administration, in the village of Yahidne, 15 km from Chernihiv, Russian soldiers held nearly 370 local residents hostage in the bare concrete rooms of the school basement. Among them are 70 children. With little food and water, in the dark, and with shared buckets for toilets, they took turns sleeping in small, overcrowded rooms. 10 elderly people died of suffocation and lack of medicine.
After the de-occupation of the region, foreign journalists visited the village and talked to its residents.
The British newspaper The Telegraph wrote in an article on April 16, 2022: “Villagers held hostage in basement for a month counted down the days until they were released.” The publication describes how nearly 400 people were forced to live, breathe, and go to the bathroom in the basement for weeks.
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“But it is the walls of the rooms under the Yahidnya secondary school that tell the chilling story of the terror suffered by the residents of the village of Yahidne near Chernihiv,” The Telegraph continues, ‘Their ’parting gift' (before the Russian army left the village - ed.) was to lock the villagers in the basement with a concrete slab against the door.”
According to Reuters, the Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment on the events in Yahidne. “Russia denies allegations of extrajudicial killings, torture and ill-treatment of civilians. The Kremlin said its troops were not targeting civilians and accused the Ukrainian authorities and the West of falsifying evidence,” Reuters writes.
At the same time, the Russian army itself uses schools in the occupied territories to deploy personnel and deploy weapons. After the de-occupation of the territories, traces of Russians' presence in educational institutions were found and documented, including inscriptions and drawings, which may also serve as evidence of Russian crimes against Ukrainian education and culture in international courts.
In addition to physically destroying Ukrainian schools, Russia is destroying the educational system in the occupied territories by closing Ukrainian schools, destroying libraries, and burning Ukrainian books.
The Institute of Mass Information conducted a study “How Russia destroys school education in the occupied territories of Ukraine”. The study identified four schemes by which Russia is “denazifying” education in Ukraine: recruiting teachers, “retraining” and “upgrading” collaborators, sending “humanitarian missions” and terrorizing Ukrainian educators.
Russia is constantly promoting the narrative that the Ukrainian government is unable to take care of the safety of children. The propaganda tells how “children of Donbas” and other temporarily occupied territories go to school feeling safe. While children in Ukraine are sitting in bomb shelters.
Russian propaganda claims that it is the Russian authorities who are evacuating Ukrainian children from shelling to save them. However, it is silent on who is shelling the territory of Ukraine and is the invader in this war. This is how the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia is justified.
"Southern News Service":
“Every time Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova and Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Dmitry Polyansky must provide indisputable facts that the evacuation of Ukrainian residents, including their children, is a forced measure. Unlike the Kyiv regime, which finds it convenient to keep old people, women and children hostage as human shields during the fighting (Mariupol, Lysychansk, Sievierodonetsk are examples), Russia is still trying to save these lives.”
Another reason invented by Russia for deporting Ukrainian children is rehabilitation in children's camps, after which the Russian authorities refuse to return the children back.
“The children who have been returned and reunited with their families testify to the total Russification,” Daria Gerasymchuk, Advisor to the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights and Child Rehabilitation, told Detector Media.
The Associated Press in its article “How Moscow takes Ukrainian children and makes them Russians” writes about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Moscow. It is about children who were found in the basements of war-torn cities, children whose parents died, and children from orphanages. According to the newspaper, citing the Ukrainian government, most children from orphanages are not orphans - their parents were in difficult living conditions.
The publication conducted its own large-scale investigation, which is confirmed by dozens of interviews with parents, children, and officials in Ukraine and Russia; emails; and media publications. This investigation “reaches out” to children already living in Russia.
The author notes that the Russian authorities have done everything to facilitate and encourage the adoption of Ukrainian children.
“AP found that officials deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-controlled territories without consent, lied to them that their parents did not want them, used them for propaganda, took them into Russian families and granted them citizenship,” the newspaper writes.
The article includes a story by Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children's ombudsman, that a group of 30 children evacuated to Russia from the basements of Mariupol initially sang the Ukrainian anthem and shouted “Glory to Ukraine!” But after a while, they fell in love with Russia, and Russia itself adopted a Ukrainian teenager.
“Whether they have parents or not, raising children of war in another country or culture can be a sign of genocide, an attempt to erase the very identity of the enemy nation,” the British newspaper states.
Deportation and illegal adoption are not the only crimes committed by Russians against Ukrainian children.
According to the Institute of Mass Information, Russians also commit sexual violence and torture. Children are sent to camps for “political re-education,” Russified and militarized, forced to work, and used in numerous propaganda videos and campaigns.
According to the PACE resolution and the conclusion of the OSCE Expert Mission, the deportation of children from Ukraine is recognized as a war crime and an element of genocide.
On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Putin and Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova.
We worked on the material:
Researcher of the topic, author of the text: Yana Yevmenova
Editor-in-Chief: Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Literary editor: Yulia Futey
Website manager: Vladyslav Kukhar
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A new school year has started in Ukraine under martial law. Only schools with shelters that meet the safety requirements of the State Emergency Service have accepted students this year.
During her online speech at the Shaping the Future of Learning Now event held on the sidelines of the UN Future Summit, First Lady Olena Zelenska noted that “in Ukraine, the indisputable right of children to education has to be physically protected from Russian aggression.” “That is why we are probably the country with the largest development of online learning in the world today,” the website of the Office of the President of Ukraine quoted the First Lady as saying.
The website https://saveschools.in.ua, which is a resource of the Ministry of Education and Science, documents and provides real-time statistics on destroyed educational institutions. According to their data, as of now, 3798 educational institutions have been affected by bombing and shelling, of which 365 have been completely destroyed.
Russia justifies its attacks on educational institutions in Ukraine by allegedly deploying Ukrainian troops in them. Propagandists are actively using mirroring tactics to hide the crimes of their own army.
Back in 2022, the Russian media outlet Military Observer published an article about the behavior of the Ukrainian army, which mirrored its own crimes in Ukraine:
“The Ukrainian military, whose behavior in this case is not much different from that of representatives of terrorist groups, are trying to hide behind schools, kindergartens, and hospitals to carry out military activities. At the same time, the West is seeing images of “Russian troops hitting civilian objects.” Of course, they keep silent about the fact that these objects are being converted into military targets by the troops of the Kyiv regime.”
Here are some typical examples of how enemy propaganda works.
Lenta in an article on November 13, 2022 about the strike on Mykolaiv:
“The barracks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, built in one of Mykolaiv's schools, were hit by a Russian strike on November 1, along with the personnel. An activist of the Mykolaiv underground told RIA Novosti about it.”
“According to him, 'the military are whining about the hits to the gymnasium building'. This is the First Ukrainian Gymnasium named after Mykola Arkas. The activist also said that in 2014, “a compote called ‘Blood of Russian Babies’ was sold in the canteen at this school,” the propaganda outlet writes.
Tsargrad publication:
“Ukraine has come up with a cunning plan to cover the positions of the Ukrainian military. They will be placed in educational institutions of Zaporizhzhia, including kindergartens. During this period, classes in schools and preschools will resume. This also applies to additional education. This was reported to the RIA Novosti news agency by an official of the security agencies, citing a source in the Armed Forces.”
“Gazeta, citing the Russian Defense Ministry, reports on the placement of weapons by the Ukrainian military in schools in Sloviansk, Pokrovsk and Dnipro.
“According to him, Ukrainian troops built a stronghold in one of the schools in the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, placed sniper positions and large-caliber machine guns on the top floor, and heavy equipment and MLRS in the courtyard. At the same time, they are holding residents of neighboring houses in the school gym “under the pretext of ensuring security”.
The Russian edition of Politikus reports that bombs were used on a Ukrainian university:
“A bomb hit the Armed Forces barracks in the border town of Sumy in the evening. The barracks was located in the building of a local university, which was taken over by the military. As a result of the explosion, the building was partially destroyed.”
Lenta on the air strike on Kharkiv:
“Earlier it became known that the Russian military attacked the militants of the Ukrainian national battalion Azov (recognized as a terrorist organization and banned in Russia), who were hiding in a school in Kharkiv. The attack took place early in the morning on Thursday, September 19.”
Most of the destruction of educational institutions occurred in the frontline and border regions. In the first months of the war, the Russians actively attacked Ukraine's state border from the east, Crimea, and the north with the support of aviation.
Cities were bombed in broad daylight.
The evidence of the Russian army's war crimes against educational institutions in Ukraine was captured by the photographs of Ukrainian documentary filmmakers.
There were battles for the strategically important city of Vasylkiv in the Kyiv region, with Russians trying to seize the airfield, blowing up an oil depot, and the city under constant shelling. On February 27, 2022, a Russian missile destroyed the Vasylkiv Vocational Lyceum.
The siege of Chernihiv and the partial occupation of the region lasted for more than a month. There were frequent low-level air raids over the city.
The Podusivka neighborhood is one of the most affected in Chernihiv. Here, the Russian army bombed two schools at once, dropping bombs from an airplane.
According to TEXTs (in cooperation with the newspaper Vist (Chernihiv)), school No. 18 was home to the city's terrorist defense, which included local residents preparing to defend their city from the invading army, as well as doctors, teachers, and cooks. The exact number of victims is unknown. There were children with their parents in school #21 who miraculously survived.
The village of Makariv, Bucha district, Kyiv region, is among the settlements that suffered from Russian atrocities. For a short time, the occupiers managed to occupy a part of the village, shelling residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
On July 8, 2024, a rocket attack on the Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital destroyed the classroom and library of the Superheroes School educational center located on the hospital's premises. Children who were being treated in the hospital studied there.
The war has literally bombed education in Ukraine. But there is something that cannot be counted, restored, or returned: lost human resources, lost opportunities, and lost time when children cannot study.
The Russian army is not only destroying Ukrainian schools, it is also turning them into torture chambers. They were found in school buildings in the de-occupied territories.
According to the Chernihiv District State Administration, in the village of Yahidne, 15 km from Chernihiv, Russian soldiers held nearly 370 local residents hostage in the bare concrete rooms of the school basement. Among them are 70 children. With little food and water, in the dark, and with shared buckets for toilets, they took turns sleeping in small, overcrowded rooms. 10 elderly people died of suffocation and lack of medicine.
After the de-occupation of the region, foreign journalists visited the village and talked to its residents.
The British newspaper The Telegraph wrote in an article on April 16, 2022: “Villagers held hostage in basement for a month counted down the days until they were released.” The publication describes how nearly 400 people were forced to live, breathe, and go to the bathroom in the basement for weeks.
“But it is the walls of the rooms under the Yahidnya secondary school that tell the chilling story of the terror suffered by the residents of the village of Yahidne near Chernihiv,” The Telegraph continues, ‘Their ’parting gift' (before the Russian army left the village - ed.) was to lock the villagers in the basement with a concrete slab against the door.”
According to Reuters, the Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment on the events in Yahidne. “Russia denies allegations of extrajudicial killings, torture and ill-treatment of civilians. The Kremlin said its troops were not targeting civilians and accused the Ukrainian authorities and the West of falsifying evidence,” Reuters writes.
At the same time, the Russian army itself uses schools in the occupied territories to deploy personnel and deploy weapons. After the de-occupation of the territories, traces of Russians' presence in educational institutions were found and documented, including inscriptions and drawings, which may also serve as evidence of Russian crimes against Ukrainian education and culture in international courts.
In addition to physically destroying Ukrainian schools, Russia is destroying the educational system in the occupied territories by closing Ukrainian schools, destroying libraries, and burning Ukrainian books.
The Institute of Mass Information conducted a study “How Russia destroys school education in the occupied territories of Ukraine”. The study identified four schemes by which Russia is “denazifying” education in Ukraine: recruiting teachers, “retraining” and “upgrading” collaborators, sending “humanitarian missions” and terrorizing Ukrainian educators.
Russia is constantly promoting the narrative that the Ukrainian government is unable to take care of the safety of children. The propaganda tells how “children of Donbas” and other temporarily occupied territories go to school feeling safe. While children in Ukraine are sitting in bomb shelters.
Russian propaganda claims that it is the Russian authorities who are evacuating Ukrainian children from shelling to save them. However, it is silent on who is shelling the territory of Ukraine and is the invader in this war. This is how the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia is justified.
"Southern News Service":
“Every time Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova and Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Dmitry Polyansky must provide indisputable facts that the evacuation of Ukrainian residents, including their children, is a forced measure. Unlike the Kyiv regime, which finds it convenient to keep old people, women and children hostage as human shields during the fighting (Mariupol, Lysychansk, Sievierodonetsk are examples), Russia is still trying to save these lives.”
Another reason invented by Russia for deporting Ukrainian children is rehabilitation in children's camps, after which the Russian authorities refuse to return the children back.
“The children who have been returned and reunited with their families testify to the total Russification,” Daria Gerasymchuk, Advisor to the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights and Child Rehabilitation, told Detector Media.
The Associated Press in its article “How Moscow takes Ukrainian children and makes them Russians” writes about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Moscow. It is about children who were found in the basements of war-torn cities, children whose parents died, and children from orphanages. According to the newspaper, citing the Ukrainian government, most children from orphanages are not orphans - their parents were in difficult living conditions.
The publication conducted its own large-scale investigation, which is confirmed by dozens of interviews with parents, children, and officials in Ukraine and Russia; emails; and media publications. This investigation “reaches out” to children already living in Russia.
The author notes that the Russian authorities have done everything to facilitate and encourage the adoption of Ukrainian children.
“AP found that officials deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-controlled territories without consent, lied to them that their parents did not want them, used them for propaganda, took them into Russian families and granted them citizenship,” the newspaper writes.
The article includes a story by Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children's ombudsman, that a group of 30 children evacuated to Russia from the basements of Mariupol initially sang the Ukrainian anthem and shouted “Glory to Ukraine!” But after a while, they fell in love with Russia, and Russia itself adopted a Ukrainian teenager.
“Whether they have parents or not, raising children of war in another country or culture can be a sign of genocide, an attempt to erase the very identity of the enemy nation,” the British newspaper states.
Deportation and illegal adoption are not the only crimes committed by Russians against Ukrainian children.
According to the Institute of Mass Information, Russians also commit sexual violence and torture. Children are sent to camps for “political re-education,” Russified and militarized, forced to work, and used in numerous propaganda videos and campaigns.
According to the PACE resolution and the conclusion of the OSCE Expert Mission, the deportation of children from Ukraine is recognized as a war crime and an element of genocide.
On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Putin and Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova.
We worked on the material:
Researcher of the topic, author of the text: Yana Yevmenova
Editor-in-Chief: Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Literary editor: Yulia Futey
Website manager: Vladyslav Kukhar
UAPP is an independent association of professional Ukrainian photographers, designed to protect their interests, support, develop and promote Ukrainian photography as an important element of national culture.
UAPP's activities span educational, social, research and cultural initiatives, as well as book publishing.
UAPP represents Ukrainian professional photography in the international photographic community and is an official member of the Federation of European Photographers (FEP) — an international organization representing more than 50,000 professional photographers in Europe and other countries around the world.
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