News 3/21/ 22 in News stories

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In a dingy Russian classroom with worn-out rugs, elementary school students lined up to form the shape of the letter Z: the symbol used on much of Russia’s military equipment in Ukraine and an emblem of support at home.

Now it has become part of classroom lessons as the Kremlin expands its anti-Ukraine propaganda to students as young as kindergarten.

Thousands of posts appeared on Russian social media featuring schoolchildren — up to high school age — attending special “patriotic lessons” or posing for pictures forming Z and V-for-victory signs.

“I’m for the president. I’m for Russia!” a teacher exclaims in a clip posted Saturday by an official page for the Nizhny Novgorod region.

“We are united and therefore invincible!” a choir of young children screams into the camera, holding balloons in the white-blue-red colors of the Russian flag.

Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov, openly described schools as central to Moscow’s fight to “win the information and psychological war” against the West. Russia has imposed laws against spreading “fake” news or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces.

The country’s Internet regulator has ordered media outlets to delete reports using the words “invasion” or “war.” Russian state TV removed all entertainment shows from its programming, filling the broadcasts with propaganda-filled talk shows and state-vetted news.

On March 3, Kravtsov said more than 5 million children across Russia watched a lesson called “Defenders of Peace.” It’s part of a government-produced series broadcast online in schools or given to teachers in the form of a slide show for mandatory lessons. The series includes other episodes, including “Adult Conversation About the World,” all pushing Putin’s historical revisionist speeches justifying the Ukraine invasion. (Recordings of these lessons were reviewed by The Washington Post.)

Children are told that Ukraine never truly existed as a country and was once just a tiny piece of land called Malorossiya. A slide show of maps follows, claiming that modern Ukraine is a construct of the Soviet Union and areas such as the Crimean Peninsula — which Russia forcibly annexed in 2014 — accidentally fell into Kyiv’s hands after the Soviet collapse in 1991.

The lesson shifts to the World War II era, noting a historical truth that some factions in Ukraine collaborated with the Nazis, although many Ukrainians fought against the Axis. But then the lesson goes on to echo Putin’s agitprop of using “Nazi” smears against the current government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Events of the past few weeks, such as Russian attacks on civilian targets including a maternity ward in Mariupol and a school near the western city Kharkiv, are presented as fake news. The narrative of “Washington-created” attempts to “whitewash Ukraine” is especially emphasized in sessions for high-schoolers and university students, who are more likely to shun state TV and get most of their information online.

In one school presentation obtained by the London-based Dossier Center, an investigative outlet funded by self-exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russian attempts to shift the blame for attacks on residential areas in Kharkiv.

“Fake: Russian military is attacking residential areas in Kharkiv. True: High-precision Russian weapons only strike military targets and don’t hit civilians, which the Ministry of Defense said many times,” it said.

The presentation also urges children to only trust official sources, such as websites of the Russian Defense Ministry, Putin and state-run media. — Mary Ilyushina

Read more: Putin’s war propaganda becomes ‘patriotic’ lessons in Russian schools