From the start of the Donbas war in 2014 to the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to justify Moscows aggression against Ukraine by citing the ostensible need to protect the Russian language, and those who speak it, from the government in Kyiv.

But in the swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine that its forces occupy after more than a decade of violence, Ukrainian officials and activists charge that Russia is seeking to eradicate the Ukrainian language part of what they say is a broader campaign to Russify these regions and erase the Ukrainian identity.

Russia is poised to take a big step in that direction when the school year starts on September 1: Under a draft directive from Russian Education Ministry, the study of Ukrainian is to be removed from the curriculum at elementary and secondary schools in the parts of Ukraine that Russia occupies about one-fifth of the country.

The order cites changes in the geopolitical situation in the world as the reason for eliminating Ukrainian from the curriculum.

But Ukrainian officials and activists say its aimed not to reflect changes but to impose them to enhance Moscows dominance over Crimea and four mainland regions that Putin, seven months into the full-scale war, baselessly claimed belong to Russia: Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk, and Luhansk.

The directive fits into Putins efforts tosubjugate Ukraine, which he has made clear he believes has no right to full sovereignty and should be, at best, a loyal appendage of Russia. He has also falsely claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and propaganda on Russian state television repeats these untruths regularly.

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The occupiers understand perfectly well that cultural identity is very important and that a person who knows the Ukrainian language could in the future become part of Ukrainian world, a part of the Ukrainian community, said Stanislav Fedorchuk, chairman of the Ukrainian Peoples Council of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russias goal is to break the connection with the language as a means of communication and remove it from the educational process, Fedorchuk said.

To a large degree that has already happened, particularly in Crimea and the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that Russia has controlled since 2014-15, the first years of the war Moscow fomented in the Donbas after a Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power by massive protests known as the Maidan.

Olya, an 18-year-old who went to school in a Russian-held part of the Donbas and now attends university on Ukrainian-controlled territory, told RFE/RL said that after the occupation, Ukrainian language and literature were combined into one class that was held once a week at first, but then less and less often -- and in 2020 they just cancelled it.

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Russia uses schools in occupied areas torecruit pupilsinto various militarized, paramilitary structures with the aim that these children go on to fight for the Russian Federation, Fedorchuk said. Within this process, theres just no place for the Ukrainian language or anything Ukrainian.

In the 2023-24 school year, Ukrainian as a native language was mandatory in the Russian-occupied parts of the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions, according to the Russian Education Ministry, while Ukrainian classes were available at the request of parents in Crimea and the Russian-held parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Technically, removal from the curriculum does not prevent individual schools from offering classes in Ukrainian. But they would have to be held outside the regular class schedule and would be likely to draw unwanted attention to everyone involved, from the school administrators to the pupils and their parents, Fedorchuk said.

I think they left this in place in order to wash their hands of this to say, Look, we gave schools in the occupied territories freedom to keep Ukrainianif they need to, he said.

In reality, efforts to teach or study Ukrainian in person or remotely -- risk persecution by Russian occupation authorities, Ukrainian and international rights groups say.

Iryna Dubas, a school principal, teaches Ukrainian classes in secret to students in Russian-occupied territories.

Russian authorities and their proxies punished distance learning or teaching of the Ukrainian curriculum and threatened parents with fines, loss of custody of their children, and detention if they did not enroll their children in Russian schools, or if their children studied the Ukrainian curriculum remotely,Human Rights Watch saidin a June 2024 report.

Some 44,000 of the roughly 600,000 school-age children in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine -- about 7 percent study remotely at Ukrainian-led school, according to the Almenda Center Of Civic Education, a Ukrainian group whose activities include documenting violations of the rights of children in wartime.

The pressure on schools, teachers, and students goes beyond just the matter of the Ukrainian language itself. Occupying authoritiesused coercion, detention, ill-treatment, and torture to pressure Ukrainian teachers to work with them or to hand over students files and other school data, the US-based organization said.

After seizing swaths of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions early in the full-scale invasion, the Russian occupation authorities surveyed parents and found that about half of them wanted their children to study Ukrainian, Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at Almenda, told RFE/RL.

Nevertheless, he said, occupation authorities set about removing Ukrainian books from schools and libraries, sometimes burning them and often replacing them with Russian books.

In the Azov Sea port city of Berdyansk and other locations in the Zaporizhzhya, Okhredko said, Russian forces held some teachers in basements for days in an effort to cow them into collaborating, subsequently deporting a number of them after the ordeals.

Ukrainian teachers in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine have been subjected to threats and abuse to force them to work against their will, Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International,said in October 2024. They face a stark choice: leave everything behind and flee or become part of an education system that seeks to indoctrinate children, including by justifying Russias war of aggression.

A woman mourns at the site of a Russian missile strike that killed multiple children and adults in a residential area of Kryviy Rih, April 5, 2025.

According to Human Rights Watch, the restrictions Russia is imposing on the study of Ukrainian and the curriculum it has introduced which includes history textbooks that justify Russias invasion [and] portrays Ukraine under its current government as a neo-Nazi state violate multiple international conventions and standards.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees childrens right to an education that develops respect for the childs own cultural identity, language and values, as well as the national values of the childs country of origin, HRW said in the report last year.

Russias imposition of changes to education in occupied territories also violates other international human rights standards, including the prohibition against propaganda for war, the childs right to mother-tongue education, and parents right of choice regarding their childrens education, it said.