Mykhailo Lebedev was just 16 years old when Russians captured his city, having subjected it to a relentless campaign of bombardment lasting three months, razing residential areas, hospitals, schools and universities alongside killing tens of thousands of residents. An orphan, Mykhailo was forbidden from leaving his private guardian, because he was a minor. “Mariupol, it was like another world,” Mykhailo recalls. “You saw people walking with satisfied faces, and you were happy to walk along the street. And now there are almost no people in the city, and you see everything is destroyed.”
He attended eighth grade at Mariupol School No. 38. During the Russian occupation he was briefly forced to study at another school as his was one of some 52 that were damaged or destroyed in the city. His school was later restored, and the children returned. However, the circumstances were very different.
The teenager said that at School No. 38, the Ukrainian language stopped being taught and Russian propaganda was widespread. Textbooks were replaced, and teachers were forced to talk about how the Russian Federation came to “liberate” Ukrainians. “Ukraine is bad, Russia came to “liberate” you, that now everything will be good, everything will be good, everything will be wonderful,” he said. Meanwhile, Russians were establishing artillery positions on the school grounds to shoot at Ukrainian soldiers (and which no doubt created another level of psychological distress to both teachers and students). “The Russian army drove onto the school grounds. We had a huge field there – they brought in tanks and armoured personnel carriers and started shelling Azovstal,” he said.
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Russia has systematically and intentionally been attempting to erase the very idea of Ukrainian national identity and culture. This has been true in the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas since 2014, and across a wider area following the full-scale invasion of 2022. The occupation authorities have clearly been committing acts in areas under their control which are prohibited in international law – including in the genocide convention – such as forcible transfer. Children are subjected to these Russian methods seemingly aimed at destroying their national group, and nowhere is this more evident than in Russia’s re-education campaigns.
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In Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories, Russia has been purposefully erasing Ukrainian language, culture and identity while promoting a cult of war, glorifying the former USSR (at School No. 65, which Russians destroyed, and then rebuilt, occupiers erected a large Lenin monument), and installing teachers who often bully Ukrainian students (Russian propaganda has been calling Ukrainians “Nazis” since 2014). School administrations quickly try to eradicate all traces of Ukrainian identity, while imposing Russian as the language of instruction.
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Russia’s mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children is widely known, with both the Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, both wanted by the ICC for the unlawful deportation and transfer of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia.
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A Russian strategy document signed by Putin, and published on November 25, explicitly laid out the country’s intentions to force those located in the temporarily occupied territories to become Russian, by adopting “additional measures to strengthen overall Russian civic identity” there. The aim is to ensure “no less than 95 percent” of the country’s population identify as Russian by 2036 (Russia claims that the eastern Ukrainian lands it invaded are its “historical territories”).
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