- Russia has produced a regional history course, Donbass and Novorossiya: History of Our Region, for children aged about 10 to 13 in the occupied territories: one textbook for Year 5 and one for Years 6 and 7, published in Moscow in 2026 with the exclusive rights held by the Russian Federation. Read together, the two books are a single three-year programme that ends with the region's "return to Russia" in 2022.
- The books rarely deny facts outright. They remove the links between them. Kyiv stays the capital of Rus, but its inheritance passes to Moscow; the Zaporozhian Sich is called a "Cossack republic", but its Cossacks are "Russian settlers" who "spoke Russian"; and the Sich's destruction by the Russian Empire in 1775 is never described, only its "former" lands.
- Ukraine enters as something imposed from outside: first as a contemptuous Polish name meaning "borderland", then as a Bolshevik republic into which the region was placed "against the will of its inhabitants", then as a "self-styled" state turned into an "anti-Russia". Ukrainian-language schooling is presented as violence against a Russian region.
- The end of the story is announced on the first pages and everything before it is selected as proof. End-of-chapter questions build the required conclusion into the question: pupils are asked to "prove" that soldiers of the war against Ukraine are worthy of the heroes of the Second World War.
The Russian state has written a local history for the regions it has occupied. Donbass and Novorossiya: History of Our Region, by A. P. Bogdanov and V. N. Ilyin, covers the past of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts from the Stone Age to 2022 in two volumes: a 248-page textbook for Year 5 and a 280-page textbook for Years 6 and 7. Both were published in Moscow in 2026 and state that the exclusive rights belong to the Russian Federation. The versions examined here leave blank the date and number of the Ministry of Education order admitting them for use, which suggests they are pre-approval or first-print files from July 2026, ahead of the 2026 to 2027 school year.
This briefing is based on two analytical notes and a joint synthesis by the Centre for the Study of Occupation, and on its matrix of more than sixty quotations. TOT Insights has checked the quotations below against the textbooks; page numbers are the printed page numbers. Translations from the Russian are our own.
One course in six stages
The two books do not work as separate texts. Year 5 builds a genealogy that runs Rus, Moscow, Russia, and fits the Cossacks into a "Russian" world. Years 6 and 7 carry the same logic through the imperial, Soviet and present-day periods.
| Stage | Pages | Narrative | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| I. Rus | Year 5, pp. 92–100 | Kyiv is the capital of Rus, but Rus is already explained as the forerunner of the "Russian state". | Lays Russia's claim to the inheritance of Kyiv. |
| II. Moscow | Year 5, pp. 150–158 | Moscow becomes the "centre of Russian spirituality"; the battle of Kulikovo, the "liberation of the Russian lands". | Moves the centre of Rus from Kyiv to Moscow. |
| III. The Cossacks | Year 5, pp. 192–228 | The Sich is a "Cossack republic", but its Cossacks are Russian-speaking and Orthodox; Pereiaslav is "reunification". | Builds Ukrainian Cossackdom into Russian state history. |
| IV. Empire and Novorossiya | Years 6–7, pp. 16–69 | Incorporation into Russia was "beneficial"; "deserted steppes" became a "flourishing province". | Legitimises imperial settlement. |
| V. The Ukrainian twentieth century | Years 6–7, pp. 164–198 | A "nationalist regime in Kyiv", an administrative "attachment to the Ukrainian SSR", the "forcible imposition" of the language. | Presents the Ukrainian presence as foreign and unnatural. |
| VI. 1991 to 2022 | Years 6–7, pp. 241–271 | "Self-styled" Ukraine, "anti-Russia", "coup d'état", "return". | Makes present Russian policy the culmination of a historical law. |
Rus claimed, not denied
The Year 5 book does not erase Kyiv. It states plainly that Kyiv was one of the two political centres of early Rus and, from 882, its capital. What it does is change the name of the subject. "Kyivan Rus" barely appears; instead the text speaks of "Rus", the "Russian state" and the "Russian lands", so that the Muscovite principality can later join the same line without explanation. The lands of Kyiv and Volhynia under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania become simply "Russian lands", while the Galician-Volhynian and Lithuanian-Ruthenian traditions are given no role as alternative heirs of Rus.
Together the two statements make a smooth handover: Kyiv is the beginning, Moscow the next centre of the same "Russian" history. A Ukrainian line of succession between them is never needed to explain anything.
"Ukraine" as a foreign insult
The clearest single example is on page 216 of the Year 5 book. The name "Ukraine" is introduced not as the historical name of a territory or a people but as a contemptuous Polish label, and Ukrainians as people the Poles treated as animals. Ukrainian identity is given no origin of its own; it is a name stuck on from outside.
The same motif returns in the twentieth century, where Ukraine becomes a Bolshevik administrative construction and then a Western geopolitical project.
The Cossacks without a Ukrainian state
The Year 5 book describes the Zaporozhian Sich in some detail and calls it a "Cossack republic", with its own elected officers and assemblies. But it identifies the Zaporozhians as "Russian settlers" and makes speaking Russian a condition of being a Cossack. The Sich's self-government is acknowledged; it simply leads nowhere Ukrainian.
The book then sets the Don Cossacks against the Zaporozhians as a lesson in loyalty: the Don Cossacks are disciplined and faithful to the throne, the Zaporozhians unreliable. The desirable historical behaviour is early service to Moscow.
The Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 is called a war of liberation, but its subject is "the Russian people of Little Russia" (Malorossiya), not a new political community. Pereiaslav in 1654 is the restoration of an earlier unity. The book concedes that the Zaporozhian Host "received broad autonomy", but the autonomy is a detail inside a reunification already complete.
The missing year: 1775
In the Years 6 and 7 book the destruction of the Sich disappears. Pupils read that the New Sich "existed until 1775" and, three sections later, that in 1775 the lands of the "former" Zaporozhian Sich were added to the Novorossiya province. Between the two sentences the act that made the Sich "former", its liquidation by Russian troops on Catherine II's orders, is never described. The consequence is there; the agent and the act are not.
Earlier destruction is handled the same way. Mazepa "planned to betray Peter I"; the Cossacks of the Chortomlyk Sich "gave in to his promises"; and "in response" Russian regiments razed their fortresses and the Sich. Having already called incorporation into Russia "beneficial", the book turns the destruction of Cossack centres into a matter of putting the steppe in order.
Novorossiya and the myth of the empty land
The chapter "The Birth of Novorossiya" opens with a question that contains its answer: how did "deserted steppes" become a flourishing province in a few decades? Yet the same book has just described Cossack winter settlements, trade routes, administrative districts and crafts. The emptiness is not a finding; it is a frame, and it serves to legitimise imperial settlement. A few pages later Russian expansion is placed outside the category of colonisation altogether.
The Ukrainian period as an error to be corrected
The Years 6 and 7 book announces its conclusion on page 5, before any evidence is presented: the region "returned" to Russia two and a half centuries ago, was placed in the Ukrainian Soviet republic "against the will of its inhabitants", and Russia was "forced" to begin the "special military operation" in 2022. The rest of the book serves as retrospective justification.
The Ukrainian state of 1917 to 1921 is never given a neutral name; it is the "nationalist regime in Kyiv" with its foreign "patrons". The Ukrainisation of the 1920s, in reality part of the Soviet-wide policy of indigenisation, is narrowed to violence by a Ukrainian language against a Russian population, and Ukrainian schooling is said to have held back education.
Independent Ukraine appears under the scornful heading "In 'self-styled' Ukraine" (samostiinaya). Economic decline, language policy, historical memory and foreign policy are assembled into one causal chain in which Kyiv, under Western and nationalist pressure, tears the region away from Russia. The two books lock together here: Year 5 has already presented Mazepa as a traitor, so Ukraine's different view of him in Year 7 becomes "falsification".
The final paragraphs do not describe events so much as prescribe how to judge them: 2014 is a "coup d'état", the protests are the "Russian Spring", the Ukrainian government is the "Kyiv regime", and the last section is titled "Return to Russia".
Questions with the answer inside
The questions at the end of each section matter as much as the text. They seldom ask pupils to compare interpretations. They ask them to explain, retell or prove a conclusion that the question already contains.
| Source | Question | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Year 5, p. 228 | «Расскажите, как происходило воссоединение русских земель в XVII в.» "Describe how the reunification of the Russian lands took place in the seventeenth century." | "Reunification" is given as undisputed fact. |
| Years 6–7, p. 172 | «Объясните, почему население Донбасса и Новороссии вступило в борьбу с националистическим режимом в Киеве и его покровителями.» "Explain why the population of Donbass and Novorossiya took up the struggle against the nationalist regime in Kyiv and its patrons." | The Ukrainian government is defined in advance as a "nationalist regime". |
| Years 6–7, p. 198 | Pupils are asked why Stalin declared that Ukrainisation could not be imposed by force. | Ukrainisation is given as coercion, not as a subject for analysis. |
| Years 6–7, p. 261 | «Как борьба Донбасса и Новороссии за возвращение в Россию стала примером мужества и единства народа нашего края?» "How did the struggle of Donbass and Novorossiya for return to Russia become an example of the courage and unity of the people of our region?" | "Return" and a heroic verdict are built into the question. |
| Years 6–7, p. 266 | «Докажите, что подвиги бойцов специальной военной операции достойны героев Великой Отечественной войны.» "Prove that the feats of the fighters of the special military operation are worthy of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War." | The pupil must "prove" a moral equivalence set in advance. |
What replaces Ukrainian history
| Historical phenomenon | What the textbooks put in its place | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Kyivan Rus | "Rus", the "Russian state" | Separates the inheritance of Kyiv from the later Ukraine. |
| Early modern Ukraine | "Little Russia", "West Russian lands" | Replaces a name of its own with the identity of a "part of Rus". |
| The Zaporozhian Sich | "Russian settlers", a "Cossack republic", future service to Russia | Keeps the folklore and the military heroics, removes a separate political path. |
| The Hetmanate and the Khmelnytsky uprising | "Entry of Little Russia", "reunification of the Russian lands" | Leads events teleologically to Pereiaslav. |
| The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917 to 1921 | "Nationalist regime in Kyiv" | Delegitimises the Ukrainian state project. |
| The Ukrainian SSR | Administrative attachment of Donbass and Novorossiya | Presents Ukrainian jurisdiction as artificial. |
| Ukrainisation | "Forcible imposition" | Makes the Ukrainian language an instrument of pressure. |
| Independent Ukraine | "Self-styled", "anti-Russia" | Presents statehood as an anti-Russian project. |
| 2022 | "Return to Russia" | Gives the war and occupation the image of historical completion. |
Why it matters
The most damaging feature of the course is not any single false statement but a repeated structure of causation: Russia is always the actor, and Ukraine is an object, an error or a foreign project. Four techniques carry it. Local history (Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donbass, familiar place names, archaeological sites, Cossack stories) is folded into Russian state history, which makes the larger narrative feel closer to home and less obviously ideological. Complex political conflicts become moral oppositions: loyalty and betrayal, liberation and occupation, enlightenment and nationalism, return and separation. The political vocabulary of the present war is projected back onto the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries. And the questions and creative tasks make the pupil formulate and "prove" the required interpretation in their own words.
The intended result for a child is simple: the region was never, and could never have been, part of an independent Ukrainian history, and its natural path always led to Russia. That continuity, rather than any one phrase, is the course's central product.
These are not books a parent can opt out of. Occupation schools may teach only from textbooks on the Russian federal list (see the federal textbook and literature lists), and this course is written for them. As an occupying power, Russia is bound by international humanitarian law to keep the existing institutions for children's education working, not to replace them; and under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Russia has ratified, education must develop respect for a child's own cultural identity, language and values. A state-commissioned course that teaches Ukrainian children that their nation is a foreign insult, their language a form of violence and their country's destruction a homecoming is documentary evidence of the policy of erasing Ukrainian identity in the occupied territories.
Sources and method
A. P. Bogdanov and V. N. Ilyin, Donbass i Novorossiya. Istoriya nashego kraya. 5 klass and 6–7 klassy (Moscow, 2026), both published in full on TOT Insights as primary sources. Analysis based on the Centre for the Study of Occupation's analytical notes on the Year 5 and Years 6 and 7 textbooks, its joint synthesis of the two, and its evidence matrix of quotations, all 2026. Quotations were checked against the textbook files by TOT Insights; translations are our own.
Corrections are reviewed by the research team and incorporated into the next update.