A Lesson in Oppression, Daily Brief June 20, 2024

You’re told your country doesn’t exist. You’re told your language doesn’t exist. Your teacher has been taken away and tortured.

The classroom where you’re sitting is in the same school building, in the same village, in the same region – but your world has been turned upside-down since Russia’s military occupation began.

Children have been prominent victims of Russia’s atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine. This includes being subjected to mass child abductions by Russia, which made Vladimir Putin himself the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

Russian treatment of Ukrainian children in schools under occupation adds to the ever-growing list of Russian abuses, as a new report focusing on the occupied-then-liberated Kharkivska region of Ukraine details.

Russian authorities are suppressing the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian educational curriculum. They are using Russian as the language of instruction and imposing the Russian curriculum, filled with anti-Ukrainian propaganda denying the very existence of the people to whom pupils and students belong.

In short, Russia is using the education system to carry out Russification and political indoctrination in its occupied territories.

Such measures violate the laws of war. These require an occupying power to restore public order and services in an occupied territory, including to facilitate the proper education of children. However, it must respect the laws in force in the territory before the occupation. Occupiers are prohibited from imposing their own laws, including laws on education.

It also flies in the face of other international human rights standards, including the prohibition against propaganda for war, a child’s right to mother-tongue education, and parents’ right of choice regarding their children’s schooling.

Furthermore, Ukrainian children under Russian occupation have to undergo military training as part of the imposed school curriculum.

Occupying authorities also demand secondary schools in occupied Ukrainian territory to share the names of students ages 18 and older. Russian authorities deem them eligible to be drafted into the armed forces – where they might then even be forced to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.

Teachers and other school staff who try to resist these imposed changes have faced vicious retaliation. Russian authorities have used threats, coercion, detention, and torture against them, including brutal beatings and electric shocks. Russian authorities have also threatened parents whose children were learning the Ukrainian curriculum online.

There are an estimated one million school-age children in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The occupiers deny them their right to education, as guaranteed under international law.