MELITOPOL — There are 901 schools in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Some of them have closed down, others are using Russian textbooks. And there are those that continue to teach according to the Ukrainian education system — online, and in secret.
It is dangerous to study in such schools under occupation, so parents hide flash drives with homework and textbooks, or move from cities to small towns to avoid inspections.
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The director of a high school (Lyceum) from Nova Kakhovka and a teacher from Melitopol spoke with Vazhnyye Istorii/Important Stories about how school education for children under occupation has changed since 2022.
Sudden start of the war
Iryna Dubas began her career as a primary school teacher and now heads Lyceum No. 3 in Nova Kakhovka. Anna But taught biology, German and civic education at the Melitopol Agrarian Lyceum. Their two stories offer a snapshot of what it’s like to try to educate Ukrainian children under Russian occupation.
Anna But learned about the start of a full-scale war from her students. She came to her classroom, wrote the date “February 24” on the board in German and heard noise from the lyceum dormitory: “Everyone is standing with bags and shouting: “War!” I turn to the TV and see that everything in Ukraine is burning, shelling everywhere, the announcers are talking about a full-scale invasion.” The director quickly switched the lyceum to online education so that children and teachers do not have to go to the lyceum building. On February 26, the Russian army occupied Melitopol.
Burn in hell, Ukrainian scum.
Since then, together with her daughter, colleagues, students and other citizens, Anna has gone to the protests every day. When the military started kidnapping activists and it became impossible to protest en masse, she pasted leaflets and ribbons in the colors of the Ukrainian flag around the city and tried to support her students: “I had to be a psychologist rather than a teacher. I told the students and their parents that everything would be fine, that we should hold on and that now we should be quieter and save ourselves.”
Anna and her daughter did not hide their pro-Ukrainian position and talked about what was happening in Melitopol on social networks. Over time, the women began to receive threats, even acquaintances wrote to them: “Burn in hell, Ukrainian scum.” By that time, pro-Ukrainian activists were already being kidnapped, killed and sent “to the basements” in Melitopol. Fearing denunciation, the teacher and her daughter left Melitopol in April 2022.
Defending the school
For Iryna Dubas, the school has also served as a shelter from shelling. The school formally declared a vacation after Feb. 24, but the basement continued to function as a bomb shelter — and teaching was bound to continue by other means.
In April 2022, Vladimir Leontiev, the “head of the city” appointed by the occupation authorities, organized a meeting with the directors of schools and kindergartens: he promised high salaries and said that children’s education was more important than any conflict, but that it should now be conducted in Russian and using Russian textbooks.
Dubas immediately decided to refuse this offer. And in July, when she was preparing the school for the new academic year, people from the new pro-Russian administration came to her with machine gun-wielding troops. “There was [Vyacheslav] Reznikov, the former director of the 10th school, he was appointed by the occupants as the head of the local education department,” she recalled. “Together with him were boys armed with machine guns bigger than themselves.”
With the machine gunners standing behind her. Reznikov began to speak: “Don’t refuse, Dubas Petrovna, you’re doing so well. Our troops have almost taken Mykolaiv and Odessa, there’s nowhere to go. And we need to do education, other directors will follow you.”
He gave her two weeks to think about it. “But I wasn’t even going to, I didn’t want anything to do Russia, I believed in victory and was prepared to defend my school to the last.”
Over the summer, the lyceum was enrolling new students and preparing to continue teaching online in Ukrainian when the school was raided. On August 18, Dubas was arrested.
Interrogation and exile
At the police station she was sent to a “cell” – this room used to be the passport office. Other captives were also kept there: Oksana Yakubova, director of Lyceum No. 2 in Nova Kakhovka and former employees of the city administration. The women had practically no food and water. A three-liter mayonnaise jar served as a toilet. For health reasons, Dubas needed daily injections. Yakubova helped her with this.
Every day Dubas was taken to “talk” to an officer of the FSB security services with the call sign Umar – she doesn’t know his real name:
“He asked me if I had decided to transfer the school to the Russian education system. He threatened me, saying that I could get 15 years for introducing Ukrainian education in Russia. He accused me of being an informant and that the village was shelled because of me,” Dubas recalls. “They didn’t touch me, but they electrocuted other women and told me that I was next.”
I could not betray my school.
On August 23, on the fifth day of captivity, Umar again summoned Dubas for interrogation, demanded that she collect equipment – TV sets, tablets and netbooks – and hand them over to Lilia Grishagina so that she could open Lyceum No. 1 for the school year. Only then was Dubas released — and she fled to Kyiv.
“After all this, I started working with a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist, because there are things that I can only tell to a stranger,” Dubas recalled. “I thought that time would pass and the pain would subside, but it doesn’t.”
For the first time since the full-scale war began, Dubas allowed herself to cry on August 26, her first day in Kyiv. She eventually went to bed, and in the morning she began to reassemble her lyceum.
“I could not betray my school. I realized that if I could survive life in occupation and captivity, I could do anything,” Dubas says.
Providing a safe environment
By September 1, 2022, Nova Kakhovka Lyceum No. 3 had enrolled 647 students for online learning, most of whom were under occupation or had fled abroad — before the full-scale invasion, 637 children studied here. For security reasons, only teachers who are in Ukrainian controlled territories or abroad work at the online school.
To provide a safe environment for learning, many families under occupation had to move from the city to the villages where there are virtually no soldiers and the homes are not searched.
Books in Ukrainian, as well as the Ukrainian flag, were burned by the Russian military in the courtyard
The Agriculture Lyceum also continued to operate online. Children who remained under occupation also attended classes. The teachers meet in person in Zaporizhzhya.
In the building of the agrarian lyceum in Melitopol, education also continued, but using Russian textbooks. Books in Ukrainian, as well as the Ukrainian flag, were burned by the Russian military in the courtyard of the building. The soldiers took the tractors and Kamaz trucks that were used to train the students. Four of the lyceum employees who remained in the city began to cooperate with the occupation authorities. The rest resigned.
Native harbor?
Anna But doesn’t know how exactly the lyceum works nowadays, but her friends tell her that “it’s hard to call it studying.” Thus, PE teacher Alexander Sidorov now teaches four subjects at once, including geography and economics.
There are signs all over Melitopol saying “Russia is our native harbor”, “Melitopol is Russia” and St. George ribbons:
“There are thousands of people in Melitopol who are horrified by all these agitations,” she said. “The worst thing is that we, adults, and not even all of us, realize that these are agitations. But children do not understand and there is no one to explain to them what it is.”
There are young people who are already wearing T-shirts and caps with the Russian coat of arms, But says she’s heard from her friends and former colleagues. “But I am not afraid of this. It’s not their fault that their parents didn’t take them out. I really love children and young people, we will come back and they will take it all off. Because I and other teachers will do everything to make them fall in love with Ukraine again. We will reconquer their hearts”.
Acts of heroism
Education in Russian schools in Melitopol is compulsory. Most of Anne’s former colleagues left the education field as education turned into propaganda. They just did not want to force children to draw Russian tricolors. She knows of cases when military officers come to families and, threatening with machine guns, demand that they send their children to Russian schools.
Despite the risks, there are still parents in Melitopol who send their children to Ukrainian online schools. Children usually study there in the evenings, because during the day they have to go to Russian schools. And in order to protect themselves from military raids, parents leave with their children to other apartments during lessons, just in case.
“It’s a great act of heroism to continue studying in a Ukrainian school while under occupation,” says Anne But. “In Melitopol, people rat on each other in a very dirty way. A neighbor who hears you speaking Ukrainian can rat you out at any moment.”
Parents were forced to enroll in Russian schools, they were given a bag of groceries and two thousand rubles.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to hide – phones are tapped, parents with children can be searched at any moment in the street and their phones can be checked. Flash drives with lessons are hidden in the most secluded corners of houses.
“Because of this,” she noted, “children gradually stopped coming to our online classes, and entire courses had to be closed. By the end of the last academic year [2023–2024], we had almost no students left.”
The online agricultural lyceum was no longer able to enroll students for the 2024-2025 academic year: “This lyceum is my whole life, and for me this is more than just losing my job.”
Nova Kakhovka remains under occupation just like Melitopol. But there is practically nowhere to study: the Russian-appointed authorities, according to Dubas, have never organized the education process: “In 2023, only school No. 10 in Nova Kakhovka opened, but online. Some parents were forced to enroll there, they were given a bag of groceries and two thousand rubles for this. But no one monitors whether children are studying there”.
There, as in Melitopol, parents have to carefully hide the fact that their children are studying online in a Ukrainian school. Despite this, the online lyceum No. 3, which Dubas runs, managed to enroll 568 students in the 2023-2024 school year. Two of the five graduates studied under the occupation for the whole year and finished the lyceum with honors. For their graduation, they were able to travel to the Ukrainian-controlled territory to receive diplomas and medals and enroll in Ukrainian universities. (Vazhnyye Istorii/Important Stories cannot describe the details of this route for security reasons)
Helping the front
For the 2024-2025 school year, the Nova Kakhovka Lyceum enrolled even more students than it had before the full-scale war: 685. Many of them live under occupation (Dubas refused to specify how many, because she is afraid of exposing families to possible danger. – Editor’s note):
Anna But started working as an interpreter and supervisor of academic groups in Melitopol Vocational College at Tavrichesky State University on September 1. They teach online, as this college also enrolls students from occupied Melitopol. She also keeps volunteering: since 2014 she has been weaving camouflage nets for the military. “It’s always been like this: half the day I’m teaching, the other half I’m weaving nets with the kids. This [helping the military] is the priority now. If we don’t help the frontline, there will be no education. How can education be normale when there is a war going on?”
It is also worth noting that many former students of both Anna But and Iryna Dubas, including 2021 graduates, are currently fighting for the Ukrainian military. Several are also now held captive by Russia.
