What Russia is teaching students about Ukraine conflict

Russia has launched an extensive campaign of sharing their side of the story regarding the Ukraine crisis and this time they are sending the reading material to educational institutions. 

The country faces an acute shortage of paper and has seen prices of the commodity shooting up by 15 nearly percent in a few weeks.

The Russian government has dismissed concerns over the paper shortage, calling it a “temporary phase”. The Union of Timber Producers too has toed the government’s line. “There is no need to panic. There will be no shortage of office paper, newspaper and magazine paper, paper towels or toilet paper, in a word...burdock leaves will not be needed,” assured Andrei Frolov, vice-president of the Union of Timber Industrialists and Forest Exporters of Russia.

According to him, only one US company, International Paper, which produces office paper in Svetogorsk, has suspended production due to sanctions pressure. 

“Plus, several Finnish and Austrian companies have stopped importing office paper. But all the others, including the South African company Mondi Business, are working as before. Of course, the situation is difficult, but definitely not hopeless. Suffice it to say that we buy 40 percent of the chemicals required to produce office paper in Uzbekistan,” Frolov added.

In his opinion, the cost of office paper will rise sharply only if “manufacturers and retailers start to charge high prices if logistics problems worsen”. 

“But increasing them by 300 percent is, I’m sure, an exaggeration,” Frolov stressed. He hoped that China and India, as well as the EAEU countries, would help the Russian paper industry.

But the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Education and Science has already rescheduled all school tests from spring to fall. It has also advised schools to save paper and sought details on how much they will need for the annual state exams. 

Across Russia, parents of schoolchildren are urgently buying textbooks, manuals, and notebooks for the next academic year amid the rise in price of paper. A standard pack of A4 paper, which used to cost 300 rubles per pack till recently, is now being sold for 2,000 rubles. And that too only a few packs per customer.

Russia imports 80 percent of its paper, mainly supplied by China and member-states of the European Union. Though the country had run into paper shortage since the Covid pandemic hit the world, the economic sanctions after attack on Ukraine have deepened the crisis. 

An awkward topic

Schoolchildren and students in colleges and universities are being told how to “properly understand” the Ukraine conflict and taught to distinguish between “fake news and reality”. 

Special manuals are being published using tonnes of paper to help educators and teachers with the unexpected introduction of ‘political information’ lessons. For schoolchildren, lessons titled ‘An Adult’s Conversation about Peace’ are taught and older students are trained on the topic of ‘Fakes and Information attacks: How not to be fooled’.

The ‘Dossier Center’—an investigative unit funded by exiled Russian businessman and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky—reviewed these manuals and found them to contain “distortions, manipulations, and outright lies”. Among the eight fake news cited in the manuals, “only two turned out to be real fakes”. 

One of the manuals says that Russia will only emerge stronger because of the sanctions. Europe, it said, will soon be hankering to buy Russian planes, since the country produces titanium without which aircraft cannot be built. It also identified the US to be behind the sanctions as it wanted to destroy the economies of Russia and Europe.

According to “Dossier”, a 15-page list of possible questions and prepared answers is appended to the political-educational lesson so that students could not “take the teachers by surprise”.

As it turned out, on February 28, Maria Zakharova, a representative of the Foreign Ministry, taught the teachers how to answer tough questions.

The meeting between Zakharova and school teachers of history and social studies was organised by the Moscow Department of Education. 

“The focus was on the fact that diplomatic methods have been exhausted,” RBC quoted one of the teachers as saying. 

Educators have been given reading material on how to tell children what the situation in Ukraine is from the Russian perspective. Many students as per local accounts seem to be convinced that Russia violated Ukraine's sovereignty. To change such views, Zakharova reiterated the Russian president’s position that the ‘operation’ was about “de-Nazification” and “demilitarisation” of Ukraine. 

Coronavirus to the rescue

Though paper shortage is seen as the major reason for putting off the examinations, Russian authorities have cited the fresh outbreak of Covid as a reason for such shortages. 

Just a few days before the announcement, Rotonda wrote that St. Petersburg schools were postponing tests because of a shortage of paper. The head of a school in the Krasnoselsky district even said that on March 18, district officials questioned school administrators about how much paper they planned to use for printing materials for the final exams. 

The Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Education and Science, while postponing the annual written exams from spring to fall, cited “the risk of the spread of coronavirus”. 

“Coronavirus outbreaks in China and rising incidence in European countries prove that the pandemic, unfortunately, is far from being over. Therefore, basic preventive measures, such as social distancing and reduction of contacts, are still relevant,” the press service of Rosobrnadzor said. 

“There is no paper”

As the West’s sanctions kicked in, the Finnish chemical company Kemira on March 1 stopped supplying sodium chlorate, which makes paperwhite and usable, to Russia and Belarus. The next day, SvetoCopy, a major manufacturer of office paper in the Leningrad region, stopped production of A4 sheets. 

As the paper shortage hit home and prices skyrocketed, teachers began to demand that parents provide paper for schools. “The teacher asked us to bring paper to school,” Moskovsky Komsomolets quoted the mother of a fourth-grader from the Voronezh region. “She says she needs three packs of paper for her class. There is no paper; they only sell it in bulk for 4,000 rubles per box. A teacher can't afford it.”

“And it’s hardly possible to buy it now,” another parent confirmed. “Paper has not just gone up in price, it has disappeared from sale.”

Economists think Russian printers won’t be able to switch from European to other raw materials fast. Moreover, today Russia is cut off not only from Europe and the US but also from Asia. “The entire maritime logistics is blocked: no one wants to accept Russian cargo at the ports,” said Ivan Fedyakov, general director of the INFOLine information and consulting agency.