School under occupation — how Russia through «education» breaks Ukrainian children in temporarily occupied territories

The numbers behind the war against the future. Not just schools, but a system of pressure. New data shows the scale of the problem that Ukraine has been warning about for years. In the 2025–2026 academic year, there are 1980 "Russian" schools operating in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, working according to Russian standards, and more than 582 thousand Ukrainian children are studying in them. This is not about isolated cases or a local system failure, but about a massive and deliberate restructuring of the educational space under Russia's control.

But the most frightening thing in this story is not the statistics themselves, but what lies behind them. Through schools, the occupying power builds a mechanism of pressure in which children are gradually changed in terms of language environment, educational content, historical memory, and the very sense of belonging to Ukraine. In March 2026, in the analytical report of the Center "Almenda", this is directly described as a policy of destroying the identity of children in the occupied territories.

For the Israeli reader, there are too many familiar signals here to consider this topic distant. When the blow is struck…

Read more:
nikk.agency/en/school-under-oc…