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Parents and educators in Russian-occupied areas of southern Ukraine say occupation authorities are blackmailing them into cooperating with pro-Russian schools being set up for the next academic year.
Sources tell RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that occupying authorities are telling residents that they may lose their parental rights if they do not obtain Russian passports and send their children to certain schools.
“Locals don’t want to send their children to these schools, but they are afraid,” says Serhiy Shyshkovskiy, a history teacher in the Kherson region.
“People are afraid of losing their children… and don’t know how to respond to these demands,” he says.
“In the city of Enerhodar [në pjesën veriperëndimore të rajonit të Zaporizhjas, të kontrolluar nga Rusia] there has been pressure on parents and children, regarding compliance with the laws [ruse] for the next academic year”, says a teacher in Enerhodar, who asks not to be identified for fear of consequences.
“They are looking for staff, but I want to emphasize the lack of cooperation from our teachers”, says this teacher.
She says that, as far as she knows, only two teachers have agreed to work in the new schools.
Ukrainian authorities say Moscow is preparing for a long-term occupation or even annexation of areas of Ukraine that connect the eastern Donbas region — where Russia has been waging a separatist war since 2014 — with the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Moscow has annexed. by force, also in 2014.
In an interview with the Reuters news agency on July 8, the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Andrei Kulin, said that it is unlikely that Russia will withdraw its forces “from the southern part of Ukraine”.
At the end of June, the occupying authorities in the Kherson region have announced that they are preparing a “referendum” for union with Russia.
On July 4, Moscow appointed an occupying “government” for the Russian-controlled parts of the Kherson region. It has appointed Mikhail Rodikov – a municipal official from the Moscow region – as “minister of education and science”.
Rodikov has headed the de facto Department of Education in the city of Sevastopol in Crimea, following the annexation of the region by Russia.
“It is a strange appointment, especially considering that Rodikov is 64 years old and should retire soon,” says Samar.
“But I think he still has some gunpowder left, so he is coming to Kherson to set up a Russian education system,” she adds.
To the east, in the Black Sea port city of Mariupol, the occupying administration has sent teachers to Moscow for “certification,” said Petro Andryushchenko, aide to the city’s pro-Ukraine mayor.
In a July 2nd Telegram post, Andryushchenko said that the occupying authorities, otherwise, have informally banned all teachers from leaving the city.
In May, Ukraine’s then-ombudsman, Lyudmila Denysova, said the occupying administration in Mariupol — the city devastated and largely depopulated by fierce fighting before it was captured by Russian troops in May — had made plans “to completely russify education”, presenting its standards for the next academic year.
Maksym Borodin, a pro-Ukrainian member of the Mariupol City Council, tells Radio Free Europe that the Russian education program is filled with “propaganda lessons”.
“They teach children to hate Ukraine,” says Borodin.
“In the so-called history lessons, they say that Ukraine is to blame for starting the current war and deny that Russia attacked Ukraine and Mariupol and created all this horror,” he adds.
Civilians in the occupied areas are particularly vulnerable because Russia has deliberately created an “information vacuum” there, cutting off the area from Ukraine’s internet and mobile service providers, as well as outside media, says Ukraine’s former minister of Education and Science, Liliya Hrynevych.
“They often do not have access to the Internet and only watch Russian programs on television,” Hrynevych tells Radio Free Europe.
“Even children hear all this. And, then, they go to school, where the invaders completely poison the educational space with their narratives. The longer this happens, the more their mind gets infected, especially when they don’t have adequate, true information, and are kept in isolation,” she adds.
According to her, the goal of the Russians is “the destruction of the Ukrainian national identity”.
“This is the reason why they immediately started burning books on the history of Ukraine. This is the reason why they started interfering in the education system and destroying our schools”, says Hrynevych.
According to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, 1,971 schools have been damaged since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. About 194 of them have been completely destroyed./ Radio Free Europe
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