ANALYSIS: Russia engraves its North Korean soldiers into school textbooks — the propaganda of blood

A textbook, an institutionalized state lie

In June 2026, Russia announced a revision of its single national history textbook — the book imposed in all Russian schools by personal decree of Vladimir Putin — to include references to the participation of North Korean soldiers in the war against Ukraine. This is not a footnote in a classified manual. It is a national education decision that will embed a sanctified version of the alliance between two dictatorships into the collective memory of millions of Russian children.

Myagkov, the official cited in Ukrainian media, was direct: "The participation of North Korean soldiers in the liberation operation of the Kursk region — this will of course be added." The wording says everything. Russia's invasion of Ukraine becomes a liberation. The North Korean soldiers deployed by Kim Jong Un's dictatorship into a foreign conflict become heroes. And all of this will be taught as official truth to the next generation.

The precedent of the Putin-Medinski textbook

This controversial textbook had already been written in five months on Kremlin orders by presidential aide Vladimir Medinski. It had rewritten the historical events of the past fifty years, labeling Ukraine an "ultranationalist state" and erasing any dissent from official memory. It was not simply inaccurate — it was deliberately constructed as a tool of identity mobilization to legitimize the ongoing war.

Adding North Korean soldiers is therefore not a factual update — it is the deepening of a doctrine. Moscow is not merely acknowledging Pyongyang's presence on its front — it is glorifying it, institutionalizing it, and turning it into a lasting educational narrative. This is propaganda carved into the marble of childhood.

I have never read a Russian school textbook. I do not know what it feels like, at twelve years old, to learn that Korean soldiers helped your country "liberate" land belonging to a sovereign neighbor. But I know this is exactly what totalitarian regimes have always done: they start with the children, because children do not yet question the foundations.

From autumn 2024 to death at Kursk

North Korea began deploying regular troops to support Russia in the autumn of 2024, following the signing of a strategic partnership agreement between the two dictatorships and the launch of Ukrainian operations in the Kursk region. This deployment — tens of thousands of men sent to fight in a war their country has no direct strategic reason to wage — represents one of the most aberrant forms of inter-authoritarian cooperation since the end of the Cold War.

By February 2026, South Korean intelligence estimated that 6,000 North Korean soldiers had already been killed or wounded on the front. At that point, 10,000 more remained engaged in the combat zone, and 30,000 additional troops were slated for future deployment. These figures are not rough estimates — they reflect a large-scale military commitment, consented to by a regime that sends its own soldiers to die in Ukrainian trenches in exchange for payments that analysts at Nikkei Asia estimated at over $600 million paid by Moscow to Pyongyang.

What this deployment reveals about the Moscow-Pyongyang axis

The agreement between Russia and North Korea is not an ideological alliance in the classical sense. It is a mutual survival pact between two regimes under maximum international pressure. Putin needs enough cannon fodder to absorb the considerable losses inflicted by the Ukrainian army. Kim Jong Un needs hard currency, military technology, and a permanent ally on the UN Security Council to shield his regime from international pressure.

This is a transaction between two dictatorships that have chosen to anchor themselves in a shared resistance to the international order. What the Russian school textbook will now teach — that this exchange is glorious, heroic, historical — is precisely the architecture of an anti-Western axis that intends to impose its own reading of the world on its captive populations.

Russia pays Kim Jong Un $600 million to send his soldiers to die in Ukraine, then glorifies that arrangement in school textbooks for children. The obscenity of the transaction does not prevent the glorification. It is even its exact opposite: the more sordid the transaction, the more intense the propaganda must be to erase it.

Formatting the collective memory of future generations

School textbooks are long-war weapons. What is taught to children between the ages of ten and fifteen about contemporary history shapes their political reflexes for decades to come. Putin's Russia knows this perfectly — which is why the Kremlin invested in a single, nationally imposed textbook, written in five months with the ideological priorities of the moment. This is not education. It is the manufacturing of a population that will be available for future wars.

Adding North Korean soldiers to this school narrative serves a precise objective: normalizing the idea that Russia can and must ally itself with any authoritarian regime that shares its strategic interests, that such an alliance is legitimate and glorious, and that foreign soldiers who die for Russia deserve their place in the national heroic pantheon. This is the foundation of an updated imperialist ideology for the 21st century.

The contrast with Ukrainian reality

While Russian schools teach the glorification of this alliance, Ukrainian children are learning in bunkers, basements, and windowless schools how to survive the drone strikes that North Korean soldiers helped deploy against their territory. The contrast is brutal and deliberate. Moscow is manufacturing a generation convinced of the legitimacy of war. Kyiv is raising a generation traumatized by that same war but determined to survive it.

Ukraine has its own textbooks, its own national narratives. But the fundamental difference is this: Ukrainian textbooks must work with the facts of a democracy fighting for its survival. Russian textbooks must work against the facts — glorifying an invasion, sanctifying a slow defeat, celebrating foreign mercenaries as national heroes.

There is something profoundly sinister about this precise moment — not the war itself, but the deliberate decision to train children for the next wars while this one is still unfinished. That is the mark of a regime that has no plans to stop.

The Moscow-Pyongyang axis and its strategic significance

The institutionalization of the North Korean presence in Russian school textbooks is not merely an educational phenomenon — it is a strategic signal. It announces that Moscow fully and publicly owns its alliance with Pyongyang and is proud of it. That level of public ownership suggests the Russia-North Korea axis is not a marriage of convenience set to dissolve after a ceasefire — it is a durable strategic architecture that both regimes intend to consolidate.

For the Western democracies and their Asian allies — particularly Japan, South Korea, and the United States — this reality imposes a reassessment of the combined threat that both regimes represent. North Korea can no longer be treated as a regional problem independent of the Ukrainian question. The two threats are now physically linked on the ground, and institutionally linked in the state policies of each regime.

Sanctions and their limits against this alliance

International sanctions against North Korea have demonstrated their structural limits: they have not prevented Pyongyang from developing its nuclear arsenal, from perfecting its intercontinental ballistic missiles, or from sending tens of thousands of soldiers to fight on a foreign theater of operations. The maximum economic pressure strategy that prevailed over the past twenty years must be rethought by incorporating the dimension of the Russian-North Korean alliance as a multiplier of Pyongyang's resistance to external pressure.

What we now know, from the facts on the ground since autumn 2024, is that Kim Jong Un is willing to expose North Korean soldiers to heavy losses to maintain the financial and technological flows from Moscow. It is a cynical but coherent calculation — and it must be factored into Western pressure strategies with far more seriousness than it has been to date.

Sanctions have not stopped Pyongyang's nuclear program. They have not stopped Kim from sending his soldiers to die in Ukraine. And they will not stop Russia from putting those soldiers in school textbooks. Perhaps it is time to radically rethink what "international pressure" means when applied to regimes that have chosen to no longer need the world.

The right to one's own history

Ukraine has the right to its own history — and the West has a duty to support it. That means not only weapons and security guarantees, but active support for Ukrainian cultural and educational institutions. Archives, universities, schools — everything that allows a people to remember and to narrate themselves — are priority targets of Putin's war against Ukrainian identity.

While Moscow rewrites its history to erase Ukraine as a distinct nation, Kyiv is producing researchers, historians, and educators who are rigorously documenting what Russia has done on their territory. This battle of narratives is just as important as the battle of front lines — and it will last far beyond any eventual ceasefire.

What Europe must take away from this

The European democracies watching this Russian educational manipulation with horror must also ask themselves what is happening in their own educational systems. What critical thinking skills, source verification habits, and propaganda recognition training are they imparting to their students? Russia does not only use school textbooks to format its own children — it also spreads its narratives through social media, through influence media, and through information operations targeting young Europeans.

The response cannot be purely defensive. It must be a robust media literacy program, support for independent historical research on Russia and its allies, and constant vigilance against attempts to infiltrate authoritarian narratives into democratic spaces.

Europe often congratulates itself on its democratic values. But are its educational systems truly immune to the authoritarian narratives circulating freely on the digital platforms its students use every day? I am not certain. And that uncertainty troubles me.

"Heroes of the special military operation" manufactured on demand

Beyond the North Korean soldiers, Putin's school textbook plans to include stories of "heroes of the special military operation" and examples of modern Russian weaponry. This is a mechanism of institutional celebration designed to create identification figures for young Russians — behavioral models that glorify participation in war and sacrifice for the regime.

This mechanism is standard in authoritarian regimes. The Soviet Union had its Heroes of the Soviet Union. Xi Jinping's China has its martyrs of the socialist homeland. Putin's Russia is now constructing its own contemporary war mythology, using real characters presented within ideological frameworks engineered to maximize identification and emotional allegiance.

The role of Vladimir Medinski

Vladimir Medinski, the Kremlin aide who co-wrote the original textbook, is a professional ideologue of Russian nationalism. He represented Russia during the first negotiations with Ukraine in 2022 — talks that produced nothing because Russian terms were unacceptable. He is now shaping how Russian children will understand this conflict for decades to come.

The identity of the author is not irrelevant. Medinski embodies the fusion between the Kremlin's aggressive foreign policy and its project of remolding Russian national identity. Whether at the negotiating table or in the classroom, he translates the same doctrine: Russia is a besieged power with the right to defend itself by any means necessary, including rewriting its own history.

Medinski at the 2022 negotiating table, Medinski in the 2026 school textbooks — same man, same doctrine, same project. What Russia failed to obtain at Geneva or Istanbul, it is trying to implant in its children's minds. It is patient. It is methodical. And it must be named for exactly what it is: state indoctrination.

Pyongyang as a laboratory for military cooperation

The deployment of North Korean soldiers to Russia — and the official glorification of that deployment — has implications that extend well beyond the Ukrainian theater. For South Korea, it confirms that Kim Jong Un is willing to sacrifice thousands of his own soldiers in a foreign war in exchange for strategic support. That is a signal of regime durability that reshapes deterrence calculations on the Korean Peninsula.

For Taiwan, the message is indirect but legible: authoritarian regimes engaged in wars of territorial conquest can count on substantial external support. What China observes in the Russian-North Korean model — notably the ability to weather international pressure through a solid alliance — can inform its own strategic planning for a potential operation against Taiwan.

The urgency of a coordinated democratic response

The response to this inter-authoritarian architecture cannot be fragmented. The democracies of the G7, NATO, AUKUS, and the Quad must coordinate their assessment of the combined threat from Russia-China-North Korea-Iran. Sanctions policies, arms sales, security guarantees — all these decisions must integrate the systemic dimension of an authoritarian axis that has considerably strengthened since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine needs not only military support but also permanent diplomatic support to maintain international pressure on the states feeding this axis. Every concession on North Korean sanctions, every reduction in support to Kyiv, every hesitation to clearly name Pyongyang's responsibility in the Ukrainian conflict — all of this sends a signal of weakness that authoritarian regimes immediately read as an invitation to push further.

The democracies tend to treat each crisis separately — North Korea here, Russia there, China elsewhere. The authoritarian axis thinks in systems. As long as the West fails to develop a coherent doctrine for responding to that axis as a whole, it will keep reacting to separate pieces of a game it has not yet learned to read in its full scope.

Media literacy as a democratic vaccine

Western democracies cannot stop Moscow from writing its textbooks. But they can strengthen their own educational systems so that their students are capable of identifying propaganda when they encounter it on social media, on digital platforms, in the narratives of pro-Russian influencers circulating freely across Europe and North America. Media and information literacy is no longer a pedagogical luxury — it is preparation for the reality of a permanent cognitive war.

Programs like NewsGuard, OECD digital literacy initiatives, and the work of EUvsDisinfo — all these tools exist. But they remain marginal relative to the scale of need. Russia invests massive resources in its influence operations. The Western response remains, on the whole, underfunded and fragmented. That is an asymmetry the democracies must urgently correct.

Supporting Russian dissident voices

Faced with mass educational indoctrination in Russia, the democracies have an additional tool: supporting the journalists, educators, historians, and intellectuals who have fled their country and are producing, from exile, a fact-based counter-narrative. Media like Meduza, Novaya Gazeta Europe, and independent researchers in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands are all maintaining an alternative Russian information space that the Kremlin cannot control.

Funding these platforms, facilitating their distribution, guaranteeing their security — this is investing in truth as a strategic weapon. Putin's textbooks can format Russian children for a generation. They cannot erase the internet or the archives accessible from abroad. As long as Russians can connect through a VPN and read an uncensored version of their own history, the total indoctrination project will remain incomplete.

Russian dissidents in exile are one of the West's most valuable assets in this cognitive war. They are people who paid the price of truth with their own freedom — sometimes their safety. Supporting them is not charity. It is strategy.

What this says about the Putin regime

A regime that needs to rewrite its school textbooks in wartime to include its current allies is a regime that knows its narrative is crumbling. Putin would not need to manufacture North Korean heroes if the facts of the war naturally served his story. This need for institutional glorification is an inverse measure of reality control: the less controllable the reality, the more intense the propaganda must be.

Adding North Korean soldiers to Russian textbooks is therefore both an act of raw propaganda and a confession of narrative weakness. It is the sign of a regime that must work hard to maintain the ideological cohesion of a population that absorbs, despite everything, contradictory information through informal channels.

The future of memory

History will ultimately deliver its verdict. Ukrainian archives, survivor testimony, journalistic investigations, reports from international organizations — all of this constitutes a growing and irrefutable record of what Russia has actually done in Ukraine since 2022. That record will outlast Putin's textbooks. It will outlast the regime itself. The question is how many generations of Russians will be formed by these institutionalized lies before reality reclaims its rights.

In the meantime, Ukraine resists. And every day of Ukrainian resistance is one more chapter in the true history of this conflict — the one Russian children will not read in their classrooms, but that the whole world can read in real time.

A school textbook does not choose its history. It receives it from those who hold power at the moment of its writing. The Russian children of today deserve better than the lies being imposed on them. And when this regime falls — because it will fall — it will be on them, first, to return to the truth of their own history.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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