By Olha Chepil | 2025-01-02

KYIV -- Photos of Russian troops who were killed while fighting in Ukraine have appeared en masse on walls, desks and displays at schools, making the schools more like cemeteries than places of education, say analysts and psychologists.

Russia celebrated Heroes of the Fatherland Day on December 9. Before the full-scale war with Ukraine began, this was a day when Russian schoolchildren honored the heroes of World War II.

Over the past three years in Russia, the holiday has become a glorification of the war against Ukraine, analysts say.

Russians are raising their future generations on stories about the hero-looters of Bucha or the destroyers of Mariupol, according to Kyiv-based psychologist Olga Pogrebnyak.

"In Ukraine, a hero is a defender, because he defends the land where his school is located. But in Russia there is a very strong ideological subversion of this concept," she told Kontur.

"After all, the school is in Moscow province or in the Komi Republic. But what was he defending there? ... In this regard, this [indoctrination] negatively affects a child because it deprives him or her of critical thinking," said Pogrebnyak, who works with veterans and children.

School with gravestones

In honor of Heroes of the Fatherland Day this year, walls next to classrooms in many Russian schools bore granite commemorative plaques with photographs of Russian servicemen killed in Ukraine. Under the plaques were a special stand for placing flowers and candles.

Such commemorative plaques appeared, for example, in Sosnogorsk and Nizhny Odes in the Komi Republic, Russia.

"The children are constantly in grief, in a depressed emotional state. All day long, they see that someone has died, that someone has died," said Pogrebnyak.

"And when a child is raised this way, he doesn't want anything else in life other than to become the same kind of hero, to die so that an identical gray plaque will be hung opposite his desk."

A glimpse through social networks like VKontakte makes clear the manner of celebrating Heroes of the Fatherland Day in Russian schools.

Children take out the trash at military monuments, or they clean up cemeteries where troops killed in Ukraine are buried.

This indoctrination further idealizes the image of a soldier, psychologists say.

"A child who is raised like this understands that it is splendid to die on foreign land while killing completely innocent people," said Pogrebnyak.

Additionally, the "patriotic" Hero Desk initiative has been launched in Russian schools. Dedicated to Russian troops killed in Ukraine, hero desks display their photos, biographies and achievements.

But not all children may sit at such "special" desks. Only those with high grades are allowed.

These desks seriously traumatize children because they also somewhat resemble gravestones, say psychologists.

"When I was a pupil, we too were told what a great country Russia is, how everyone around us demeans us and wants Russia to fall apart," said Svetlana Gvozdikova, mother of a third-grade girl.

She and her child moved from Krasnodar to Ukraine after the full-scale war began. She left Russia because she is opposed to her country's military aggression.

Gvozdikova lives with her daughter in Odesa, speaks Ukrainian and is waiting for her husband, now in the Ukrainian military, to come home.

"Desks and plaques with dead service personnel are horrible, but what's even worse is that these Russian soldiers come to teach children important things, for example, or on certain holidays, they come and talk about how they kill people in Ukraine," Gvozdikova told Kontur.

Making heroes out of killers

Among Russian school principals, it has become popular to invite Russian servicemen who have returned from the front to visit pupils. But they invite not just regular troops but often ex-cons and Wagner Group mercenaries.

Those ex-cons are prisoners whom Vladimir Putin pardoned in exchange for agreeing to fight in Ukraine.

Gvozdikova said she saw a video of a Russian soldier addressing pupils at a Russian school.

"He was telling them that if they finished this year with honors, he would send them the enemy's severed ears as a gift," she said. "I saw this video with my own eyes, and it's just a nightmare."

For example, on December 25, 2023, Alaberdy Karazhayev was invited to a classroom at Ulyanovsk Boarding School No. 88 Smile, which educates children with special needs, to give a lesson entitled "A Hero of Our Time."

Karazhayev, before the war in Ukraine, had received a nine-year prison sentence in 2016 for murdering his mother-in-law's live-in lover, according to Russian authorities.

"For Putin's regime, the main thing is to hide the truth about the war. To make heroes out of killers," said Nadezhda Skochilenko, mother of artist and former political prisoner Sasha Skochilenko, who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in Russia in November 2023 for replacing price tags in a store with antiwar messages.

Sasha was released in a large prisoner swap in August and now lives in Germany. Nadezhda moved to France after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Besides glorifying the invasion and the released criminals killing Ukrainians, Putin's regime tries to "instill in children the idea that it is right to go to war and even die there," Nadezhda told Kontur.

Russian schools thus have become soldier factories for Putin, which receive generous sums for the militarization of children and welcome new initiatives that often greatly traumatize children, say psychologists and analysts.

Denunciation boxes

At several schools in temporarily occupied parts of Ukraine, Russian authorities have installed boxes for submitting anonymous denunciations, the Ukrainian Center for National Resistance reported December 8.

"Students are urged to report classmates or even parents who are 'disloyal' to the occupation authorities," it said.

All letters iin the the boxes must be handed over to Federal Security Service officers by the school administration.

In addition, the schools themselves are independently compiling lists of children who show "disloyalty" to the occupation authorities and submitting them to those authorities.

"Unfortunately, a large number of denunciations are being written," Nadezhda Skochilenko told Kontur. "Naturally, the box increases the desire to make a denunciation. Both children and senior citizens are writing them."

"It's scary because the writers know that people are imprisoned for many years, sometimes people die in prison and yet they still write denunciations," she said.