NARRATIVE: Donbas Textbooks — Russia rewrites history in Ukraine's occupied schools

Minister Kravtsov announces the rewrite

On June 23, 2026, Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov announced that the Russian government would introduce unified textbooks on the history of Donbas and Novorossiya for students in grades 5 through 7 in occupied Ukrainian territories, effective September 1, 2026. This is not a routine administrative decision. It is the systematic continuation of a forced Russification policy targeting populations living under Russian occupation — a policy the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has described as an attempt to "solidify control of history" by spreading state-sanctioned narratives.

The same Kravtsov also announced approval of a "unified concept for the teaching of history" in Russia and occupied territories, including an increase in classroom hours devoted to Russian history. The objective is as transparent as it is brutal: to ensure that Ukrainian children growing up under occupation know only the Russian version of their own history.

A policy that has been running since 2023

This is not the first wave. The Russian Ministry of Education has been investing in a unified curriculum for schools in occupied territories since 2023, as the ISW notes. That year, Russia began distributing unified history textbooks for grades 10 and 11 in Russian-controlled zones. These textbooks amplified Russian narratives about the "reunification of Crimea," the "2014 coup in Ukraine," and the "causes and course of the special military operation."

Kremlin officials have themselves admitted that these textbooks foreground Russian ideological justifications for the illegal invasion, and that the textbook denies the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. This is not an interpretation — it is a confession. Russia is openly using education as a tool to destroy Ukrainian national identity in the territories it controls.

When a regime starts rewriting the schoolbooks of children it holds under its boot, it is not practicing education — it is practicing erasure. The erasure of an identity, a memory, a people. This is the most insidious dimension of this war — the one fought inside children's minds, not on battlefields.

The "reunification of Crimea" as official truth

The textbooks distributed since 2023 present the 2014 annexation of Crimea as a "reunification" — a historically inevitable return of Russian territory to its homeland. This narrative completely erases the illegal referendum held under military occupation, the violation of international law, and the fact that the majority of Crimeans never had the opportunity to freely determine their future.

For a Ukrainian child of 11 or 12 growing up in occupied Donbas, this textbook becomes their only official source of historical instruction. Without access to alternatives — Ukrainian media is blocked, Ukrainian books have been removed — this version becomes their reality. This is the Kremlin's cynical calculation: parents who resist can be intimidated, imprisoned, or displaced. But children formed by this system will become, in ten or twenty years, adults whose collective memory is fundamentally different from that of the rest of Ukraine.

The 2014 "coup": institutionalized disinformation

These textbooks also present the 2014 Revolution of Dignity — the Ukrainian popular uprising that toppled pro-Russian President Yanukovych — as a "coup" orchestrated by the West. This narrative serves several purposes: it legitimizes Russian intervention as a "response" to external destabilization, it negates the agency of Ukrainians who chose their own destiny, and it frames Ukraine as a vassal state of the West rather than a democracy in formation.

For children raised on these textbooks, the border between Ukraine and Russia is not only geographically blurred — it is historically erased. The very idea of a distinct Ukrainian identity, a culture, a language, a history belonging to Ukraine becomes suspect, even criminal. This is the definition of reversed decolonization: not liberating a colonized people, but recolonizing a people who had begun to free themselves.

Disinformation in school textbooks is the most durable form of the information war. An adult exposed to propaganda can develop critical thinking. A child raised inside propaganda takes it for reality. That is why Putin starts with the textbooks — and that is why this choice is particularly odious.

Inventing a region to justify conquest

The inclusion of the term "Novorossiya" in the title of the new textbooks is particularly significant. The concept denotes a historically Russian territory encompassing regions of what is now southern and eastern Ukraine — a geographic and historical construction that Putin revived in 2014 to justify his expansionist ambitions. The idea is to retroactively legitimize the annexation of Ukrainian territories by framing them as "historically Russian."

Teaching this concept to Ukrainian children aged 10 to 12 as established historical fact is to implant in their collective memory the ideological foundation of their own subordination. This is not history — it is generational propaganda. Ukrainian, free Russian, and international historians agree that "Novorossiya" is a recent political construction, not a historical fact.

Denying it to better impose it: the erasure of Ukraine

The ISW notes that the textbooks openly admit to "denying the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state." This is not a detail — it is the heart of the project. If Ukraine is not a legitimate state, then there is no invasion. There is no occupation. There are no war crimes. There is only a return to the natural order of a space that has always belonged to Russia. This circular, self-validating logic is the ideological foundation these textbooks seek to instill in the young minds of the occupied territories.

Resistance to this policy exists — families hide Ukrainian books, parents teach Ukrainian history in secret, teachers passively resist the new directives. But under Russian occupation, this resistance is perilous. Testimonies of violence against individuals who refuse to cooperate with the new educational system have been documented by human rights organizations.

Ukrainian parents are teaching history secretly to their children, like underground partisans. Books hidden under floorboards. Conversations whispered in surveilled kitchens. This is what cultural resistance looks like under Russian occupation in 2026. And this is what these textbooks are designed to destroy.

Violations of international humanitarian law

The destruction of an occupied population's cultural identity is explicitly prohibited by international humanitarian law. The Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, all protect occupied populations from practices aimed at forcibly altering their culture, language, and education. Russian educational policy in the occupied territories explicitly contravenes these norms.

The Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, established in May 2026 by 36 states and the EU, focuses specifically on the crime of aggression. But other international legal mechanisms — the ICC, national jurisdictions exercising universal jurisdiction — have a mandate to examine practices such as child deportation and the forced modification of education in occupied territories.

The deportation of children: an already-documented crime

The textbook policy fits within a broader picture of deportation and forced Russification. The ICC has already issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and Russian children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russian families, placed in Russian summer camps, or subjected to "re-education" programs aimed at making them adopt a Russian identity.

The new textbooks target children who have not been deported but who live under occupation. For them, Russification flows through the school — an institution that should protect their intellectual and cultural development, but which has become, under Russian direction, a tool of their identity dispossession.

An ICC arrest warrant against Putin for child deportation. Textbooks that deny Ukraine's existence. These two realities are connected. One is physical deportation. The other is mental deportation. Both are crimes. Both demand an international response that goes beyond declarations of outrage.

Teachers caught between two fires

Teachers in the occupied territories find themselves in an impossible position. Continuing to teach the old Ukrainian curriculum invites reprisals — arrest, displacement, pressure on families. Adopting the new Russian programs means actively participating in the cultural destruction of one's own students. Dozens of teachers have chosen exile over collaboration — a considerable loss for the communities they left, and for the children they might have continued to protect.

Those who remain navigate a grey zone of passive resistance. They teach the new curriculum to satisfy Russian inspectors, but keep Ukrainian cultural practices alive — the language, songs, traditions. This silent resistance is documented by NGOs and journalists who maintain contacts in occupied zones. It does not erase the harm done by the new curriculum — but it keeps a flame burning.

What children see and hear

Beyond the textbooks, the entire cultural environment has been transformed in the occupied territories. Ukrainian books have been removed from public libraries. Ukrainian flags are banned. The Ukrainian language in public spaces is discouraged, sometimes penalized. Monuments have been renamed or destroyed. The main street of several towns now bears the name of a Russian military hero where it once bore the name of a Ukrainian intellectual.

For a 10-year-old who lived in free Ukraine and now finds themselves in an occupied city, this transformation of their daily environment is a form of violence. It says: "Your country no longer exists. Your history was a mistake. You are Russian." And when school confirms this message with official textbooks, the force of that imposition becomes nearly insurmountable without active family support.

A child cannot choose between two collective memories when only one is permitted. What Russia is doing in occupied schools is a form of collective psychological violence — systematic, planned, state-funded. To call it anything less would be a euphemism these children do not deserve.

Distance learning as resistance

Ukraine has developed distance learning programs allowing Ukrainian children in occupied territories and in exile to continue following the Ukrainian curriculum via the internet. These programs — carried by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and NGOs — constitute a form of digital cultural resistance. They are fragile: internet access in the occupied territories is restricted and monitored, and families who use them face risks.

International organizations such as UNICEF and UNESCO have documented and condemned Russian educational policy in the occupied territories. UNESCO bears particular responsibility for protecting cultural heritage — and a people's educational culture is an integral part of that. These condemnations carry moral and legal weight, but lack effective coercive mechanisms as long as Russia physically controls the territories in question.

Documentation as a weapon of memory

Faced with an immediate inability to end these practices, documentation becomes a weapon of memory. Organizations like the ISW, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and investigative journalists maintain detailed archives of Russian educational policy in the occupied territories. These archives will serve — in future judicial proceedings, in truth and reconciliation tribunals, in the writing of history that will come after the war.

Russia can rewrite school textbooks. It cannot rewrite international archives. And when peace returns — in whatever form — these children will have access to a truth that was not stolen from them, only delayed. That is the promise the world owes these children: that their memory will be restored, their history returned, and the erasure itself erased.

The archives of Human Rights Watch, the ISW, UNESCO — these are the memory-keepers of a generation whose memory is being stolen. In twenty years, when those children have grown and go looking for their true history, it will be there. Someone will have preserved it for them. That is the most discreet act of resistance — and perhaps the most enduring.

Growing up inside institutional lies

What happens inside the mind of a 12-year-old Ukrainian who learns in school that their country never really existed? That the language their mother has spoken to them since birth is "a Russian dialect"? That the heroes of Ukrainian resistance were "extreme nationalists"? Psychologists specializing in war trauma have a term for this experience: forced identity dissonance. It occurs when the institutional environment says one thing, and family and emotional memory say the opposite.

For children whose parents resist passively, this dissonance is painful but managed. For children whose parents have been killed, imprisoned, or whose resistance has been broken by fear, this dissonance sometimes has no space left to exist. The school textbook becomes the only reality. This is precisely what Russian educational policy plans for — and precisely why it must be documented, condemned, and one day repaired.

The trauma of generations under occupation

Studies of populations that have endured prolonged occupations show that the effects of cultural and identity trauma pass from generation to generation. Peoples subjected to policies denying their identity — the Irish under British domination, Indigenous peoples in Canadian residential schools, Ukrainians themselves under Soviet Holodomor and Russification policies — carry these wounds in their collective memory for decades.

The current educational policy in the occupied Ukrainian territories deliberately creates these conditions of transmissible cultural trauma. This is not a side effect — it is the objective. A people traumatized in their identity are easier to control, less likely to resist, and more prone to accepting the occupier's narrative as normal and natural. This is imperial logic in all its brutality.

The history of the Holodomor — the famine organized by Stalin to break Ukrainian resistance — taught Ukraine a lesson that some in the West still have not understood: Russia has never stopped wanting to erase Ukraine. The methods change. The objective never has.

Preserving the Ukrainian language under occupation

In the occupied territories, speaking Ukrainian in public has become an act of resistance. Families maintain the Ukrainian language in their homes as a practice of identity survival. Ukrainian poems recited from memory. Stories passed down orally that Russian textbooks will never fully erase. This linguistic resistance is not symbolic — it is strategic. It keeps alive the bond between generations and Ukrainian national identity.

International organizations documenting Ukrainian culture work to archive, in collaboration with witnesses in exile and in free territories, the Ukrainian cultural, linguistic, and educational practices that must be preserved. These digital archives — texts, recordings, oral traditions — are designed to be accessible to children from the occupied territories the day their liberation allows Ukrainian teaching to be restored.

International solidarity: more than a declaration

The international community has a concrete role to play. Fund Ukrainian distance learning programs for children under occupation. Sanction the officials who implement this policy. Integrate the restoration of the right to education in one's mother tongue into the conditions of any future peace agreement. And document — now, continuously and rigorously — every decision, every textbook, every act of forced Russification, so that these acts can never be denied or minimized.

The Ukrainian Minister of Education, in partnership with international partners such as UNESCO and UNICEF, has launched programs to sustain Ukrainian educational identity for children in occupied territory and for the displaced. These programs work — insufficiently, too slowly, with too few resources. But they work. And they deserve far more support than they currently receive.

Every euro invested in Ukrainian distance learning for children under occupation is a concrete act of cultural resistance. Every child who maintains their connection to Ukrainian history, language, and culture is a future adult who will not be defined by the lies of a Russian textbook. That is the best long-term investment the West can make for Ukraine.

Russification through education: a historical precedent

Forced Russification through education is not new in the history of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Generations of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Baltic peoples, and other nations were subjected to similar policies — forced instruction in Russian, the devaluing of local languages and cultures, the rewriting of history in favor of the Russian imperial narrative. This history is known. Its long-term effects — on identity, on social cohesion, on relations between peoples — are documented.

What Russia is doing today in Donbas and other occupied territories is a repetition of that historical model — adapted to contemporary technologies, but grounded in the same logics of cultural domination. And like its historical precedents, it will fail. Peoples whose identity was targeted for theft survived, recovered their memory, and affirmed their singularity. Ukraine is itself the proof.

What the international community must do

The international response to this policy must go beyond rhetorical condemnation. Targeted sanctions against those responsible for implementing this policy — Minister Kravtsov and his subordinates — would send a clear signal. Enhanced support for Ukrainian distance learning programs is necessary. And future peace negotiations — whatever form they take — must include mechanisms for cultural decolonization, including the restoration of the right of children in recovered territories to an education in their language and their history.

These 10, 11, 12-year-olds in occupied Donbas did not choose to be in a war zone. They did not choose to have their history books replaced. They did not choose to be taught that their country does not exist. If this narrative accomplishes one thing, let it be this: behind every political decision, there are children whose future is at stake. And they deserve better than the history Putin is trying to write for them.

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.

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