In the four-and-a-half years it has controlled southeastern Ukraine, Moscow has established a new education system. Those in charge seek to ensure this system reflects the core beliefs of Russian President Vladimir Putin: that so-called “Novorossiya” was gifted by Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin to Ukraine and that social engineering can free locals from “Ukrainian delusions” and return them to their “original” Russianness.   

The education system in occupied Ukraine has been at the center of the Kremlin’s attention since the start of the full-scale invasion, and all schools were switched over to the Russian system in October 2022. Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov announced that teachers in occupied areas would be retrained en masse, with 15,000 education staff sent to “improve their qualifications.” At the same time, the Education Ministry offered significant one-time bonuses—as much as 2 million rubles ($24,060)—to attract teachers from Russian regions to work in the occupied areas.

The resulting influx consisted not only of teachers, but also managers. The education minister in eastern Ukraine’s so-called Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) is currently Yevgeny Miroshnichenko, a former vice president of Russia’s Kuban State University, while the education minister in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) is Oleg Trofimov, an alumnus of Siberia’s Tyumen University and winner of the Kremlin’s “Leaders of Russia” competition.

The teaching of Ukrainian has been gradually curtailed. In the DNR and LNR, Ukrainian was dropped as a compulsory school subject back in 2020. In the occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the Russian administrations initially declared bilingualism. However, in effect, there was also a deliberate process of Russification—like that which unfolded in the DNR and LNR after their establishment in 2014.

Even on paper, Russia’s liberal language policy did not last long. As of September 1, 2023, it was no longer compulsory to study Ukrainian. And in the summer of 2025, Russia’s Education Ministry dropped the study of Ukrainian from the school curriculum. In practice, this means that there is almost no more Ukrainian language teaching.  

A similarly important step was the publication of a separate textbook about the history of “Donbas and Novorossiya” for children aged eleven to thirteen. The textbook was added to the school curriculum on September 1, 2026 for all areas of occupied Ukraine (except Crimea, where a similar textbook was introduced after the annexation in 2014).

The problem with this textbook, which was written with the participation of former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, is not only that it distorts Ukrainian history but also that its purpose is to embed Russia’s ideological justifications for its occupation of southeastern Ukraine. The textbook argues that these areas should never have been ruled from Kyiv.   

The most positive characters in the textbook are Russian tsars, who hand over their civilizing mission in Novorossiya to leaders of the Communist Party after the 1917 Russian Revolution. This fallen banner is eventually picked up by Putin.

While the textbook is in many ways similar to its late-Soviet equivalents, there is one major difference. In the Soviet Union’s version of history, “bourgeois nationalists” were castigated and the idea of “people’s friendship” within the Soviet Union was sacrosanct, including the preservation of their distinct identities and the territorial integrity of all the constituent republics. In contrast, Medinsky’s vision has no place for “people’s friendship.” He is focused on the divided Russian people and the reclamation of their historical living space on the Black Sea hinterlands.

Ukraine features in the textbook only as an alien aggressor state that ruled these lands through a series of historical mistakes. First was Lenin’s decision to “gift” Novorossiya to Soviet Ukraine. Second was the policy of “Ukrainization” pursued by the Soviets in the 1920s (and revived in the 1960s). And third was Moscow’s weakness in 1991 that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The authors ignore the results of the 1991 Ukrainian referendum, in which a majority of voters in both Crimea and the Donbas supported their country’s independence.

Unsurprisingly, the textbook also makes no mention of the crimes of the totalitarian Soviet regime. The Stalin-era Holodomor famine that killed millions of Ukrainians is explained purely as a natural rather than man-made disaster, with no discussion of the Soviet agricultural policies of the time.

This highly partisan narrative fits the Kremlin’s goal of seeking to “reprogram” its subjects in occupied Ukraine. However, it’s important to remember that in 2023, 64 percent of students in the occupied Kherson region and 46 percent in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region wanted to learn Ukrainian. And according to Ukraine’s Education Ministry, as of 2025, more than 40,000 children living under occupation were studying in the Ukrainian education system remotely (a practice the Russian authorities view as illegal). Although locals must outwardly conform, profound changes in collective consciousness and identity are unlikely in the near future.

Furthermore, it’s important to ask: Who is the Kremlin seeking to indoctrinate? The war has led to a population collapse in the occupied territories, particularly when it comes to young people. The number of births in the DNR plummeted from 41,034 in 2014 to 7,500 in 2024. This depopulation means that there are fewer and fewer schools. The Ukrainian authorities have said that in the Luhansk region (where the front has been the most static), the number of functioning schools dropped from 252 in 2021 to 83 in 2025. Even censored Russian outlets have reported on the closure of these schools. 

In other words, the Kremlin’s ideological ambitions do not match reality. The younger generation in the occupied territories is smaller than it has ever been—and continues to shrink. Instead, the population is skewed toward pensioners and soldiers. In the DNR and LNR, about 40 percent of the population are now pensioners—significantly higher than the Russian average (27.5 percent in 2026, according to the State Statistics Service).

The occupation authorities’ education policies are a sham, just like elections constructed by political managers or the claims of Russian state propaganda. They help create the sort of picture that officials need to present to Russia’s most important spectator—Putin. In reality, though, they simply echo in a void.