• Topics / Children’s rights
• Topics / Human Rights Abuses in Russian-occupied Crimea
War and ‘Russian world’ propaganda instead of learning foreign languages in schools in occupied Ukraine
Russia is to reduce the already pitiful amount of school time devoted to learning a foreign language in order to push what it calls ‘Russia’s spiritual-moral culture’. The textbook for this extraordinary course is under preparation now, with the participation of the Russian Orthodox Church whose hierarchy, under patriarch Kirill, have actively supported Russia’s war against Ukraine. The resulting course and reduction in hours for learning a foreign language will be introduced from September 2026, with the implications of a course, likely to further push ‘Russian world’ ideology and glorify the Russian armed forces, especially serious for parts of Ukraine currently under Russian occupation.
The explanatory note to the relevant order regarding these changes, issued by Russia’s education ministry on 22 August 2025, talks about the basis of the course being “traditional Russian spiritual-moral values’. These, it claims, were listed in a decree issued by Russian leader Vladimir Putin in 2022, the year he unleashed a war of aggression against Ukraine, initiated draconian laws imprisoning those who criticized the war or told the truth about Russian war crimes, and bestowed state awards on the Russian soldiers suspected of atrocities in Bucha.
The list of subtitles gives some idea as to what this course will, in fact, entail. Children in occupied parts of Ukraine will learn that “Russia is our Motherland”, that “Patriotism is the source for the spiritual strength of the people” and that the “Family is the protector of spiritual-moral values”. By Grade 6, those same children will be fed Russian propaganda about “serving the Fatherland” in wartime and in peace. By the seventh grade, children will be ‘learning’ about the “Sovereignty of Russia” and about the same ‘Russian world’ ideology that Russia is using as justification for its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and systematic efforts to crush Ukrainian identity on any occupied territory. It is this ideology that seeks to convince children that Russia is their country and that “patriotism is the basis of general-Russian identity”. In occupied Crimea, this has been closely associated with Russia’s militarization of childhood and glorification of serving in Russia’s armed forces. In grave violation of international law, Russia has not only been carrying out conscription on occupied territory since soon after its invasion, but has also been brainwashing children, trying to convince them that they should be will to fight and die for Russia. There is every reason to assume that the new course will also push this line.
While there are no new courses planned for the school year beginning on 1 September 2025, Current Time reports that even more attention is to be given than up till now on war propaganda, with this at the expense of Social Studies which will be excluded from the curriculum until Grade 9. This is to provide more time for the so-called ‘history’ course, based on a textbook for the fifth to ninth grades, produced by Vladimir Medinsky, aide to Russian leader Vladimir Putin and mouthpiece for the Kremlin’s ‘Russian world’ and anti-Ukrainian narrative.
On the eve of the 2024/25 school year, Agentstvo reported that Russia’s education ministry had published methodological guidelines to teachers of Social Studies. These said that teachers should tell the students about the political structure in Russia; about the virtue of having a lot of children and about the “destructive ideology of the West”. They should also tell students about ‘heroes’ of Russia, with Agentstvo pointing out that most of the so-called ‘heroes’ or their relatives were individuals who had, in one way or another, helped Putin – by organizing the constitutional fiddle that has enabled him to be ‘president’ until 2036 and his ‘re-election’; by promoting his ‘achievements’ abroad, etc.
The list, entitled our heroes’ had three sections: for pre-revolutionary figures; those from Soviet times; and so-called contemporary ‘heroes’, with almost all of those in this last section linked with Putin. They included Alexander Ovechkin, the ice-hockey player and founder of the so-called ‘Putin Team’; Valery Georgiev, the conductor and Putin apologist abroad; and Vladimir Zhoga, one of the Donbas-born militants who, together with his father Artem, took part in Russia’s military aggression from 2014. He was killed fighting in 2022 and declared a ‘’hero of the Russian Federation’ by Putin. His father, who is widely described as a ‘Russian military commander’, has become a member of the ruling ‘United Russia’ party and a Putin protégé, who was entrusted, during Putin’s December 2023 teleconference, to put the ’question’ of whether Putin would be ‘standing for president’ in 2024.
Two months earlier, Vladislav Kononov, head of the relevant department within Putin’s administration, welcomed the new textbook and focus of Social Studies, saying that it was “about the fact that the best country in the world is Russia”. He criticized the old course, claiming that “it raises a passive consume who should know and be able to defend his rights.” It was based, he asserted, on a Western model of an ideal law-based state which does not exist anywhere.”
The new course, seemingly now reduced to one year, Grade 9, will be much more propagandist, with a lot of time devoted to pushing the official narrative about Russia’s war against Ukraine, which is referred to euphemistically as the ‘special military operation’. The first lesson is entitled “Introduction – Russia is our holy state”, and the old lessons on morality, on the defence of rights and civil liberties have been dropped. Social Studies will continue to be taught in Grades 10 and 11, but from a new textbook, which will presumably make the same changes to course content.
See also:
/p>