Is Putin’s brainwashing of Ukrainians into Russians even a crime?
Occupying forces are trying to rob Ukrainians of their language, culture and identity
By Peter Pomerantsev
When Russian tanks rolled into the town of Vovchansk in north-east Ukraine in February 2022, some of the locals knew what they needed to do first: save the books.
Vyacheslav Borodavka, once a headmaster and now computer-science teacher, joined forces with the town’s school teachers to hide textbooks on history and politics, geography and literature, behind radiators and under floorboards, in attics and dingy cellars.
Within days of the occupation, Russian soldiers burst into school libraries across the district.
They hauled off Ukrainian books into the hills above the town, where they dumped them in vast piles, doused them in kerosene and set them alight.
The fires smouldered for days.
Trucks full of Russian textbooks replaced the incinerated Ukrainian ones.
Orders went out that, from the next term, all teachers must switch to the Russian system.
The Ukrainian curriculum became illegal.
As the new term approached four soldiers wearing balaclavas banged on Borodavka’s door; one pointed a gun at his head when he opened it.
They locked his family in a room and began ransacking the place.
“What are you searching for?” Borodavka asked.
“Forbidden books,” they answered.
“And which books precisely are forbidden?” he asked.
The man with the Kalashnikov was stumped.
Borodavka mischievously wondered aloud if every piece of literature in Ukrainian was forbidden.
But hadn’t some classic works of Ukrainian literature been permitted during Soviet times?
Borodavka himself was once a physics teacher.
Did this mean that Ukrainian physics textbooks were now illegal?
The soldier’s answer was to pin Borodavka’s hands behind his back, put a black bag over his head and threaten to shoot him.
He bundled Borodavka into a jeep and drove him to a factory that had been converted into a prison.
Rooms were piled with dirty mattresses, and about 30 prisoners were stuffed into each makeshift cell.
Teachers and teenagers who had yelled pro-Ukrainian slogans were locked up next to robbers and rapists.
Borodavka was taken for interrogation and electrodes were attached to his fingers.
Questions were accompanied with electric shocks; inducements were intermingled with torture.
The interrogators asked him whether he would like to become the headmaster of a school.
The occupiers need experienced educators.
All he had to do was agree to teach the new curriculum.
Across the occupied territories, teachers were being coerced to become part of Vladimir Putin’s grand plan for Ukraine.
The Russian dictator’s aim is not merely to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty – he wants to erase Ukrainian identity by forcibly re-engineering its people’s minds.
To do this, Russian occupiers detain and torture teachers; intimidate children and threaten parents; murder and oppress priests who aren’t Russian Orthodox; deny people the right to study the Ukrainian curriculum; and force children to follow a Russian education system that abjures historical facts and cuts them off from their heritage.
Children are expected to join youth groups where they are taught to bear arms in preparation for fighting Russia’s enemies.
Eventually many are drafted into the Russian army and sent to kill – and be killed by – Ukrainians who until recently were their countrymen.
The intention is for a whole generation of Ukrainians to emerge as members of a Greater Russia.
This is a vast project of enforced re-education by a colonial power that wants to wipe away history as though clearing a computer disk, and reprogram a population through barrages of propaganda at the barrel of a gun.
The process is often referred to as “brainwashing” or “indoctrination”.
When I visit Ukraine as part of my work for the Reckoning Project, an NGO that documents, publicises and builds cases of war crimes, Ukrainian officials and activists frequently use the term “cultural genocide”.
There is a problem with this nomenclature.
“Indoctrination” and “brainwashing” are not legal concepts; “cultural genocide” does not exist as an idea in international law.
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention focuses on the physical destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
As the Danish delegation argued at the conference at which it was agreed, it would be a mistake “to include in the same convention both mass murders in gas chambers and the closing of libraries”.
The difficulty in capturing Moscow’s intention to destroy Ukrainian identity in legal terms has consequences.
First, it robs Ukrainians of the language to describe how they have been violated.
Many Ukrainian officials and activists whom I have spoken to claim that even the country’s closest allies don’t always understand the ultimate purpose behind Russia’s invasion.
Without articulating the full extent of Russia’s wrongdoing, there is also a risk that not all of its victims will be accounted for.
“We need to not only focus on the 19,500 children physically deported to Russia,” argues Mykola Kuleba, a former Ukrainian ombudsman for children’s rights who now leads SAVE Ukraine, an NGO dedicated to returning kidnapped Ukrainian children.
“Since 2014, more than 1.5m Ukrainian children have been subjected to relentless indoctrination in Russian-occupied territories.”
Unless a crime can be articulated, there is no way to hold the perpetrators to account through sanctions, reparations or criminal trials.
Most practically are the consequences for peace negotiations, which have started this week.
If the erasure of Ukrainian culture is not fully described in legal terms, it becomes harder for Ukraine to demand that the institutions that help form Ukrainian identity be preserved under any deal.
Fortunately, a new generation of lawyers is exploring innovative ways to try to hold Russia to account.
In doing so, they are changing the way we think about the legal impact of indoctrination across the world.
Raphael Lemkin, who studied law in the Polish city of Lwow (now the Ukrainian city of Lviv) during the 1920s, first began to develop the concept of genocide at the same time as the Soviet Union was carrying out atrocities in Ukraine, particularly what has become known as the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions in the early 1930s.
The idea became fully developed in response to mass murder of Jews and other minorities by the Nazis in eastern Europe.
Lemkin’s original definition of genocide encompassed the “disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings [and] religion”, as well as physical extermination – with the ultimate intention of destroying entire national groups.
In his first drafts for the UN Genocide Convention, Lemkin even used the term “cultural genocide”.
Examples of this included banning the use of a group’s language in schools or daily life, restricting printing and distribution of publications, and destroying cultural institutions such as libraries, museums and monuments.
In 1948 at a conference organised in Paris by the UN to ratify the Genocide Convention, Lemkin sought first to gain support of African delegations and those of other colonised countries, since much of colonial rule fell under his expansive definition of genocide.
He hoped that the Allied powers, who saw themselves at the vanguard of human rights in the aftermath of the second world war, would decide to atone for their historic behaviour by adopting the convention.
He was wrong.
The French and the British were concerned they might suffer repercussions.
The Americans worried that the convention might apply to the forced assimilation of Native Americans and racial segregation against African-Americans.
Destroying churches and libraries was “barbarous and unpardonable”, they argued, but not as serious as wiping out a people.
Thus the legal concept of genocide that emerged at the convention focused on physical destruction; Lemkin was distraught.
The problem remains, however, that the attacks on identity which Lemkin described in his definition of “cultural genocide” have been committed by Russia during its invasion of Ukraine.
As I review my own reporting, witness statements recorded by the Reckoning Project, and research by organisations such as Almenda, which focuses on children’s rights in the occupied parts of Ukraine, I can see the outline of a co-ordinated plan to destroy the “national pattern” of Ukrainians and impose a new one.
First come the physical attacks on cultural heritage: book burnings; the removal of Ukrainian texts from libraries; the emptying of Ukrainian art, folklore and historical objects from museums.
According to testimony given to the Reckoning Project, Russian soldiers ordered one librarian to remove Ukrainian folk costumes on display as well as books on Ukrainian history and politics.
When the librarian called a regional official, he told her to obey the soldiers: “Forget Ukrainian.
There should be no inscriptions in Ukrainian, no books.
Forget it.”
Russia’s invasion has destroyed or damaged over 2,000 cultural institutions, including 120 museums, 750 libraries and over 1,000 cultural centres.
The destruction is worst in the occupied territories and towns along the front line: 87% of cultural institutions in Donetsk, 59% in Kharkiv and 46% in Luhansk have been affected.
In occupied Kherson, Mariupol and Melitopol, Russian occupiers have carted off objects from fine art, archaeological and folklore museums, removing everything from Scythian gold to local archives, 19th-century paintings to artisanal embroidery.
The aim is not just to spirit away precious artifacts under the excuse of keeping them “secure”, but to wipe out the memory of the indigenous culture.
Historians themselves are often targets.
In Kherson, Oleksiy Palah, an expert on the 18th century, was detained for almost a month in the autumn of 2022 and threatened with torture and execution.
The soldier who interrogated him explained that Palah has been put in prison since historians are more dangerous than soldiers because they poison people’s minds.
Palah was ordered to give an interview for an article in the Russian press that argued that Ukrainian nationalism was a product of Western machinations; he was also tasked with writing articles about the Russian imperial history of Kherson.
The city was liberated in November 2022 before he could fulfill his orders.
The violent intimidation of teachers is often accompanied with job offers.
The Russians desperately need people to staff kindergartens, schools and universities for the next stage of their campaign: indoctrination.
At first they struggled.
According to Almenda, during the first summer of occupation, only two out of the 60 headteachers in the Kherson region agreed to teach the Russian curriculum.
To replace those who refused, the occupying forces promoted teachers with drinking problems and school caretakers.
Those who did agree to work with the new regime were taken to nearby Russian cities for training (Russian state media reported that 20,000 educators from the occupied territories were trained in 2022).
The Russian curriculum glorifies imperial and Soviet history.
Conquered territories, such as Ukraine, are described as “entering” or “joining” Russia.
The collapse of the USSR is presented as a tragedy that shattered a beautiful object which needs to be restored.
Present-day Ukraine is always portrayed as an “ultra-nationalist” state that needs to be “denazified”.
It is a junior “brother nation” to Russia and shares in the greatness of the Russian language, Russian scientific and cultural achievements and Russia’s “holy duty” to defend the Motherland from enemies.
Textbooks only cite Ukrainian achievements in the context of broader Russian or Soviet ones, such as victory in the second world war.
Though in principle Ukrainian language instruction is still permitted in some places, in practice it is extremely limited, with lessons phased out or students told that teachers are unavailable.
(In the face of Russia’s aggression, various proposals have also been suggested on local and national level in Ukraine to restrict the use of Russian.)
Speaking Ukrainian in school is dangerous.
Human Rights Watch reports that goons in Melitopol put a bag over the head of a schoolboy who spoke Ukrainian, drove him dozens of kilometres into the countryside and abandoned him to walk home.
Mobiles are searched for Ukrainian apps, pro-Ukrainian songs or memes.
When they go to summer camps, those who wear Ukrainian insignia on their clothes are punished.
Parents who are suspected of having pro-Ukrainian sympathies are informed by headmasters that if they take their children out of school the kids will be forcibly sent to a boarding school.
Some parents carry on giving their children lessons in the Ukrainian curriculum, provided online by Ukraine’s Ministry of Education, but they live in fear of a neighbour informing on them, and of the secret police, who go door to door listening out for Ukrainian lessons.
Merely owning Ukrainian textbooks has now become illegal: they have been designated as “extremist” content glorifying a “Nazi state”.
Even speaking Ukrainian in public has become risky: it’s seen as a sign of disloyalty, and can warrant a visit from the security services.
Russian media constantly broadcasts about the “fake” nature of Ukrainian identity, using language reminiscent of past genocides.
Russia claims it needs to “de-worm” Ukraine’s desire for independence and “cleanse” the country; those who resist are “no longer humans”.
Religious freedom is under threat too.
Russia wants to suppress the Ukrainian Orthodox church and elevate, in its place, the Russian Orthodox church, even though only around 5% of people in the newly occupied territories were members prior to the invasion.
In December 2024, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said that the Russian army had killed 50 priests.
Evangelical Christians also face persecution and are often accused of being American spies.
One evangelical was beaten with a baseball bat and tasered, while a Russian Orthodox priest performed an exorcism on him.
The effects of indoctrination are already manifesting themselves.
Health workers report how children returned to Ukraine start weeping as they write in Ukrainian – in Russia, they were punished for doing so.
In places that have been occupied since the beginning of the war, it’s evident that people are making accommodations.
They are willing to compromise to make sure they don’t fall foul of the authorities, such as by agreeing to get a Russian passport in order to have official status and benefit from state services.
There are ways by which we can attempt to understand the longer-term effect of indoctrination: first, the experiences of people who have been living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
Maria, who spent her teenage years there before fleeing to unoccupied Ukraine in 2024, described how “in the Donetsk People’s Republic being quiet and invisible is a way of survival…the system creates people who won’t defend their position or what they think.
They are told that disagreeing won’t matter.”
After a while her sense of identity began to dissolve.
“I didn’t know who to consider myself, because the Donetsk People’s Republic was something incomprehensible, a non-existent thing.
It was somehow considered wrong to consider myself a Ukrainian, because I have no ties to Ukraine, I don’t know how people live there, what is happening there…
I wasn’t sure if I could still consider myself Ukrainian because I was cut off from Ukraine.”
This sense of feeling unmoored is common.
Between 2020 and 2022, I worked with colleagues at the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research and Ukraine’s Public Interest Journalism Lab to conduct online focus groups with people living in what were then known as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.
The participants were all over 18, and remembered living in an independent Ukraine.
They used the pronouns “we” and “our” inconsistently.
Sometimes these pronouns were associated with the Donbas republics, Russia or even Russia and Ukraine at the same time.
Interviewees explained how they used to support their local sports team as “ours”, but struggled to work up enthusiasm after teams relocated to Kyiv.
They used to celebrate the victories of the Ukrainian national football team – now they felt confusion.
They still celebrated the victories of Oleksandr Usyk, the boxing world heavyweight champion, as “our boy”.
But generally they felt abandoned by both Ukraine and Russia.
In September 2022, the limbo regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as newly occupied territory, were illegally incorporated into the rest of Russia.
A psychologist I talked to in Kyiv noticed how her friends in occupied territories, though opposed to Putin and the invasion, would start to echo phrases that Russia is “so big, so vast, so strong”.
These inhabitants have a very direct opportunity to be part of the “Russian world”: they are being drafted into the Russian army.
Parents in Donetsk and Luhansk have, for years, been encouraged to send children from the age of eight to militarised youth groups.
Official documents define their aim as increasing children’s “readiness to defend the Fatherland”.
They include classes on how to use and assemble weapons, combat tactics and sabotage.
Students learnt to shoot, sing patriotic songs and express “unconditional love” to “our holy Russian land” and “readiness to join the holy fight”.
Since 2014, 43,000 Crimeans have been conscripted to fight for Russia against Ukraine.
More have been press-ganged in Donetsk and Luhansk since the full-scale invasion.
In 2024,10,000 were recruited from the occupied territories.
Witnesses who observed them in the first year of the invasion say that “proper” Russian soldiers looked down on these recent recruits from the occupied territories, giving them the lowest ranking jobs guarding road blocks or as prison guards.
Joining the “Russian world” means their lives are treated as callously as those of the other soldiers.
Listening to the testimony of Maria and others who had lived in occupied territories, Russification doesn’t always sound like enthusiasm about some grand imperial project: it can be more about submitting to a political culture of passivity out of necessity to survive.
The witness statements about war crimes collected by the Reckoning Project and other organisations make clear that the Russian army mixes this culture of obedience with something else: the freedom to humiliate, to rape and pillage and torture with impunity.
The system allows you to be both a passive victim and a sadistic supremacist.
The Kremlin’s attempt to turn Ukrainians into Russians is the latest version of a colonial policy that stretches back over 200 years.
“Russia’s indoctrination policy towards Ukraine changes in line with what it sees as the greatest danger to it,” says Eugene Finkel, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.
During the 19th century the tsars thought the main threat to their empire was the rise of national sentiment.
Over the second half of the 19th century teaching, publishing and performing plays in Ukrainian were banned.
Members of secret societies advocating for greater national rights were arrested or exiled by the secret police.
The Soviets initially thought to co-opt nationalist impulses.
Ukrainian schools and literature flourished.
But freedom of language was only tolerated so long as Ukraine was subservient to the authority of the Soviet state.
Stalin would kill some 4m Ukrainians, from peasants to leading cultural figures.
As Stalin grew determined to impose centralised control, he reintroduced the idea that Ukraine and Russia formed a single cultural unit.
He resurrected the myth that the rulers of the Russian empire were descended from Kyivan Rus, a medieval principality centred on Kyiv, and through them to Roman emperors of Byzantium.
Russia was cast as the “older brother” to Ukraine and the “natural” leader of the Soviet “family”.
Today Putin adopts a collage of repressive tactics from the past.
“In the occupied territory”, says Finkel, “we have Soviet methods of mass repression with more tsarist paranoia about the expression of any national identity.”
Statues of Lenin have been erected in occupied Ukraine even though Putin disdains him for allowing the creation of an independent Ukraine.
Serhy Yekelchyk, a historian at the University of Victoria, explains that he puts up Lenin statues, because “in Ukraine Lenin doesn’t stand for communism, but for Russian control.
”“When we see the evidence of Russia’s concerted efforts to attack Ukrainian identity, we understand this is not just one crime…it’s a tangled web of violations.
Out of that web, we start untangling,” explains Tsvetelina van Benthem, a legal scholar at the University of Oxford and adviser to the Reckoning Project.
Together with her colleagues, Kareem Asfari and Ibrahim al-Olabi, she has been exploring possible legal approaches to holding Russia and Russia-affiliated individuals to account.
The first step is to distinguish the criminal responsibility of individuals from the responsibility of states.
One can, for instance, use existing international law regarding incitement to genocide to charge propagandists who use dehumanising rhetoric and call to liquidate people in the occupied territories.
Ukrainian human-rights groups have already made submissions along these lines to the International Criminal Court.
Those responsible for enlisting young Ukrainians fall foul of international law that forbids occupying forces from making populations under their control fight against their own country – a prohibition that is even cited in Russian military manuals.
However, these laws do not cover Russia’s broader campaign of indoctrination.
Because of this, lawyers look beyond the responsibility of individuals under international criminal law to the variety of obligations binding states under human-rights law.
The bans on the Ukrainian curriculum, for instance, look like they contravene the right to seek and impart information and the right to education.
Yet though these rights protect people’s liberty to speak and receive information freely, they do not quite address the issue of being forced to adopt new thoughts and ideas.
Another route might run through the right to preserve cultural, religious and political identity, which is part of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Russia is a party.
But this convention only covers children up to the age of 18.
According to van Benthem and Asfari, it is freedom of thought, a right listed alongside freedom of conscience and freedom of religion in Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one of the major multilateral treaties protecting human rights, that most aptly applies to Russia’s tactics.
Freedom of thought has been nicknamed the “forgotten freedom” by legal scholars.
It is rarely invoked and has never been rigorously defined by scholars, let alone the courts.
A rare exception occurred in 1998, when Kang Yong-Joo, a South Korean who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for spying for North Korea, brought a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee, the body of experts that monitors states’ adherence to the covenant.
Kang claimed that his confession had been extracted by torture, after which he had been forced to go through South Korea’s “ideology conversion system”, which was designed to “induce change” in a prisoner considered to hold pro-communist beliefs (the system was abandoned in 1998).
This includes writing a “statement of conversion” that addressed questions such as: “Do you admit your sins?”; “What do you think of communism and socialism?”; “What do you think of North Korea and [its founding despot] Kim Il-sung?”; and “What do you think of liberal democracy?”
When Kang refused to renounce the communist beliefs ascribed to him, he was put in solitary confinement for 13 years.
The Human Rights Committee vindicated him, citing Article 18, which includes freedom of thought, as one of the rights that had been violated, though it gave no explanation as to their thinking behind this.
The Reckoning Project’s lawyers are not alone in seeing potential for wider use of “the forgotten freedom”.
In 2021 Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, raised the possibility in a report.
Shaheed admitted that there was a challenge in distinguishing attacks on freedom of thought and legitimate persuasion: parents cajole their children, companies advertise their products and governments nudge their citizens to adhere to their preferred policies.
One difference, Shaheed argued, was the use of coercion to change someone’s mind.
This clearly applies to Russia’s actions in occupied Ukraine.
Shaheed doesn’t mention Ukraine in the report, but he does highlight other cases: Ethiopian “rehabilitation camps” where political prisoners are “forced to endure political indoctrination, poor living conditions and agonising physical activities with the purported goal of altering their thoughts”; and the detention of ethnic Uyghurs in “re-education” camps in China’s Xinjiang region, which the Chinese government uses in order, in its own words, to “wash brains” and “cleanse hearts” of what it terms “extreme religious ideologies”.
Shaheed argued that an attack on freedom of thought doesn’t necessarily need to be accompanied by physical threats and blatant coercion.
It could also mean the freedom from psychological “manipulation”.
One way of determining whether coercion took place lies in the difference in power between influencer and influenced.
Did the victim give consent to being manipulated?
Are they aware of being influenced?
Do they have recourse to alternative sources of information?
Lawyers for the Reckoning Project have had to come up with new methods to try to turn what is still a theory into a plausible case.
They have developed a survey for parents, guardians and others with relevant information which contains over a hundred questions probing everything from the songs children are forced to sing in school and the punishments if they refuse, through to changes in feeling experienced by children towards their families.
Children themselves are only interviewed as a final resort in order not to retraumatise them, and only in the presence of prosecutors so they are not forced to repeat the process needlessly.
The violations of human-rights law, such as freedom of thought, can be reviewed by UN bodies, courts and mechanisms established by human-rights treaties, and the International Court of Justice.
States that support Ukraine can take countermeasures such as economic sanctions for breaches of these fundamental rights.
That could happen quickly.
In November 2024 the British government sanctioned ten Russian officials, including the heads of militarised youth groups, for “the forced deportation and brainwashing of Ukrainian children”, specifically referencing the “systematic attempt to erase Ukrainian cultural and national identity”.
Part of Russia’s aim in the invasion of Ukraine was to show that international law and human rights are meaningless, and that an age of empires, in which the destinies of entire peoples are casually remade, has returned.
But there is the possibility that the war could provoke a contrary reaction, and provide legal clarification to forms of oppression that have hitherto been overlooked.
Lemkin would have been appalled by the circumstances but perhaps encouraged by the progress towards one day holding the Kremlin accountable for its crime of crimes.
Peter Pomerantsev is one of the founders of the Reckoning Project and the author of books on Russia and propaganda. He is a Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University
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