Russian military forces parents to send children to Russian schools in occupied Kherson region

In the temporarily occupied part of the Kherson region, collaborators accompanied by armed soldiers came to the homes of Ukrainian families and tried to force children to attend schools that had introduced a Russian curriculum.

The head of the Kherson regional military administration , Oleksandr Prokudin, said this during the telethon.

According to him, the collaborators threatened adults with deprivation of parental rights if they refused. In addition, they checked the gadgets of children and parents for applications that they could use for distance learning in Ukrainian educational institutions. Prokudin also noted that the Russian occupiers continue to impose their own education system, which spreads anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

"In educational institutions, children continue to be brainwashed by Russian propaganda, forced to write letters to members of the so-called "military operations", textbooks with rewritten history are brought in, and military training classes are held," he said.

Prokudin called the overall situation in the temporarily occupied communities "extremely difficult" - the locals lack medicines and food of satisfactory quality. Kherson Regional Medical Center also receives reports of refusals to provide emergency medical care if Ukrainians under occupation have not received Russian passports:

"The ambulance refuses to come to emergency calls if a person does not have a Russian passport, as well as the so-called 'medical insurance'. The fire department ignores calls - the locals mostly extinguish fires on their own."

In addition, without a Russian passport, locals cannot move freely, have difficulty finding a job and risk being deprived of parental rights.

Earlier, the occupation authorities added questions to the demonstration version of the Russian Unified State History Exam (known in Russian as the USE) for 2025, which is analogous to the Ukrainian EIT, about the war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as about the temporarily occupied territories.

Prior to that, the "deputies" of the so-called "regional duma" of Kherson region presented a draft law "On Spiritual, Moral and Patriotic Education in Kherson Region." The initiators of this bill were "deputies of the Kherson Regional Duma" from United Russia. According to the Kremlin's proxies in the occupied territories of Kherson region, "in the era of global confrontation with the West, the struggle is for the minds and hearts of people. Therefore, through patriotic education and strengthening traditional spiritual and moral values, they plan to unite Russian society and strengthen national identity. That is, to destroy the Ukrainian identity.

In addition, Russians forced children from Kherson region to tear up the graves of victims of Nazi mass shootings in 1941-1943 near Henichesk. The invaders called this involvement of schoolchildren in the exhumation of human remains"patriotic education." In addition to children, heavy machinery was also involved in the "search work," which could simply destroy the burial site.