Education Is Not for Everyone: Russia Is Unable to Provide Its Own Schools with the Necessary Textbooks, Yet Has Delivered Them to Occupied Cities in Ukraine

The occupiers rushed to deliver tons of Russian textbooks to Ukrainian schools, while students in Russia itself are not provided with materials for the school year.

Since 2014, children in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions have been forced to study using Russian textbooks. Throughout the occupation, tons of schoolbooks have been brought from Russia to the so-called republics. Russia is doing the same now in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

Back in June, it became known that the occupiers had delivered textbooks for studying the Russian language and literature, the history of Russia, and other core curriculum subjects to one of Mariupol’s schools. In particular, Mariupol Mayor’s adviser Petro Andriushchenko reported the delivery of about five thousand textbooks to a school library.

The start of the school year was prepared just as thoroughly in temporarily occupied Kherson. There, the occupiers not only brought Russian textbooks to educational institutions but also destroyed all Ukrainian ones from school libraries.

At the same time, the Kremlin is far less “attentive” to the education of its own Russian children. In the “great country,” as Russian propagandists like to say, there apparently are simply not enough resources to provide textbooks for its own schools. In particular, the outlet Kavkazsky Uzel, citing numerous complaints from parents, reports a shortage of учебные materials in schools in Dagestan. The lack of textbooks affects not only residents of remote villages and small towns in the republic; it is also a reality in Dagestan’s large cities. As parents of local students report, textbooks are not just insufficient—some subjects are not provided with textbooks at all. As a result, parents are forced to purchase учебные materials themselves, even though the state is obligated to supply them.

All of this looks deeply ironic and once again demonstrates Russia’s true attitude toward its own citizens. According to available data, Dagestan accounts for the highest number of casualties in ethnic terms among Russia’s losses in the war against Ukraine.

Thus, while Dagestanis are being cast in the role of “liberators” and used to pursue the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions, their own children lack even the most basic textbooks.

Nadiia Rohalska