Less than 250 schoolchildren study in Ukrainian in Crimea

There are 249 children studying in Ukrainian in Crimean schools, which is 0.2% of all students on the Crimean peninsula.

The Representative Office of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (ROC) reminded that before the annexation of Crimea, 13,589 children studied in Ukrainian on the peninsula.

"In the 2018/2019 academic year, according to the monitoring of open sources of information of the occupying state, 249 students, or 0.2% of the total number, studied in Ukrainian in the temporarily occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea," the agency said in a statement.

The Representative Office of the President of Ukraine in the ARC stated that Russia "uses education in the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol as a means of assimilating the population, creating conditions under which education in educational institutions is carried out mainly in Russian."

Earlier, Amnesty International reported that Ukrainian teachers in the Russian-occupied territories faced a choice - to flee their homes or to teach a curriculum based on Russian state propaganda.

In June, human rights activists from Human Rights Watch stated that the Russian occupation authorities were banning the Ukrainian language and curriculum, imposing the Russian education system, spreading anti-Ukrainian propaganda, and introducing the Russian language of instruction in educational institutions in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

The organization's report "Education in Occupation: Forced Russification of the Education System in the Occupied Territories of Ukraine" documents Russia's violations of international law regarding the right to education in the previously occupied territories of Kharkiv region and other regions of Ukraine that remain under Russian occupation.

According to Ukrainian experts, there are still about a million Ukrainian children of school age in the territories occupied by Russia. According to data obtained by Human Rights Watch from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, more than 62,400 children in the occupied territories continue to receive education in Ukrainian secondary schools remotely.

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