After occupying Ukrainian territories, Russia occupied their local universities as well

In January 2023, Russia’s Science and Higher Education Minister Valeriy Falkov allowed some universities in the occupied territories of Ukraine to issue diplomas in line with the Russian official template. Their list included universities of the occupied Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Melitopol State University (MSU) and others, which, by the time the decree was signed, had already moved from the part of Kherson Oblast liberated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) to Russian-controlled territories. That included Genichesk and Skadovsk, Crimea, and Krasnodar Krai. Around the same time, Russia passed a federal law regulating the work of schools and universities in the “new regions”.

In May 2023, Minister Falkov stated that the integration of the new regions into the Russian educational space had been successfully carried out. The ministry estimated that it will need to spend 70 billion rubles to fund “29 educational and 22 scientific organizations” with 103 thousand students.

After the conflict in the east of Ukraine broke out, many Donbas-based universities got “split”: part of their faculty chose to cooperate with the new authorities, while the rest helped organize the work of their institutions in evacuation.

In fact, Russia started “integrating” Ukrainian universities back in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea. In August 2014, then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered the establishment of the Vernadsky Crimean Federal University (CFU). The university was formed on the basis of seven Crimean universities that had existed in the peninsula before. For example, the Ukrainian Tauride National University was formally abolished, and the Tauride Academy was opened on the annexed territory in its place, and was later integrated into the CFU. The faculty who refused to cooperate with the Russians continued to work at the exiled Tavricheskiy National University in Kyiv.

The Russian-controlled authorities of the self-proclaimed LPR and DPR chose not to abolish the universities in the republics; instead, they simply “split” them. As early as 2014, a part of faculty and students advocated for their transfer to the Ukrainian-controlled territories, while the rest supported the new “authorities”.

For example, in September 2014, the Vasil Stus Donetsk National University (DonNU) came under the jurisdiction of the self-proclaimed DPR, changing its name to DonSU [Donetsk State University]. According to its website, “after having survived the hardships of the armed conflict with honour”, the university began to “look to the future with optimism”. Before the conflict in the east of Ukraine, DonNU was considered one of the best universities in the country: the QS World University Rankings even included it in its 2014 rating of top world universities together with three other Ukrainian institutions. Faculty who refused to work under the new “authorities” had to leave.

Larisa Shaulskaya, former dean of the DonNU School of Economics, told Bereg that DonNU was the first university that decided to move out from Donbas. “Our experience became an example for other universities in the first wave [of occupation in 2014] as well,” says Shaulskaya. Universities that moved to Ukrainian-controlled territory from the self-proclaimed LPR and DPR continued to work under the same names. In 2015, Ukraine withdrew the educational licenses of the universities that remained in the territories of the LPR and DPR. In response, the occupation administrations provided those universities with new licenses issued by these self-proclaimed “republics”.

In September 2014, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science (MES) decided to create a database of teachers and students who wanted to move to Ukraine-controlled territory, and opened registration for them on its website. Shaulskaya recalls that students were actively registering, but teachers hesitated. By that time, many university staff had already received job offers from other universities in Ukraine, but not all of them wanted to leave home.

“We realized that quite a lot of people were [afterall] ready to jump into the unknown and set up their universities in a new place,” says former dean Shaulskaya. In her words, teachers and students of the universities which moved out in the first wave left Donetsk on their own. In a hurry, the faculty did not have time to take university equipment with them, but they got lucky in what mattered most: the university management system (i.e. the application for the administration of curricula and courses) was already stored on electronic media. Therefore, the same DonNU was quickly able to restore the educational process in its new buildings after having moved to Vinnytsia.

Larisa Shaulskaya admits that although the faculty managed to take the university management system out from Donetsk, it was difficult to reopen the university in Vinnytsia: during the move, the university administration staff underwent some changes.

“We ourselves didn’t fully understand how it would all play out. But at the same time, we were deeply united by the understanding of our mission,” says Shaulskaya. “We understood that we were doing a very important thing — preserving Donetsk National University.”

Shaulskaya refers to the institution that remained in Donetsk as a “clone university” or a “double”. In her words, due to these “clones”, universities that have relocated to Ukraine are facing academic issues. For example, international databases now feature two different universities with the same name, which affects the citation metrics of scholarly works.

Shaulskaya’s former colleagues who decided to remain in Donetsk did so for family, economic, and political reasons, she says. She notes that building a life in a new place is not easy, so she does not condemn those who stayed: “It was rather a disappointment. We saw that people we worked with for many years had a completely different perspective on the situation and decided to support the activities of the fake university.”

Student Maksim Pavlov states that his fellow university classmates continued to leave Donetsk even after 2014. Most of them, he says, moved to Ukraine because they believed there were more opportunities for them than in Russia. “By the third year of college, less than half of the people in my group [in Donetsk] remained there to finish their studies. And only one person seems to have gone to Russia,” Pavlov notes.

From 2014 to 2022, the universities run by the “republics” were under the control of their own ministries of education: they issued diplomas with their own seals that were recognised in Russia.

Russia took advantage of the dependence of university management. Maxim Pavlov recalls that while he was studying, the university administration pressured students to obtain Russian passports. For example, students with Ukrainian citizenship were told every year that they would not be allowed to take exams or receive diplomas. However, all of this ultimately “turned out to be mere scare tactics”.

Another student of DonSU, Dmitry Milov (name changed for security considerations), recalls in a conversation with Bereg that in 2021, all residents of the self-proclaimed DPR began to be handed Russian passports: “Everyone who happened to have one or who obtained one in advance was forced to vote in the [2021] elections for the [Russian] State Duma. Those who did not vote were threatened with expulsion or dismissal.”

The universities of the “republics” were not isolated from Russian educational processes even prior to the official annexation of the LPR and DPR: Russian educational institutions began cooperating with them long before the “referendum” that took place in 2022. For instance, in March 2018, Yesenin Ryazan State University and DonSU signed a cooperation agreement. Moreover, by 2019, DonSU received accreditation from the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

In the summer of 2022, Russia’s Ministry of Education increased university admission quotas for high school graduates from DPR and LPR — the number went up from 18,000 to 23,000 spots. Donbas graduates were granted the right to enter universities without having to take the Unified State Exam.

In February 2022, Donbas students were mobilized for war. The management of some universities advised their students not to leave their homes to avoid being sent to the battlefield.

A few days before the start of the full-scale invasion, authorities of the self-proclaimed DPR declared a mass evacuation of women, children, and the elderly to Russia. Schools and universities temporarily stopped teaching. On February 25, the head of the “republic” Denis Pushilin signed an order for a general mobilization — and students were not exempt from it.

The night before the invasion, DonSU president Svetlana Bespalova recalled the “brave acts of the Donbas people” during The Great Patriotic War, and on February 24 she urged students and professors from Donetsk to repeat them. “Donbas was famous for its heroes. Let’s remember the two miner’s battalions that were known across all the fronts during the Great Patriotic War. Today, students and professors, just like in 1941, go to the battlefield to protect Donbas, their homeland. A young man understands that defending his homeland is an honor,” she noted.

Donbas students were mobilized at the end of February. They were sent to DPR’s People’s Police branches where they were marked as “second in line after professional soldiers”, RIA Novosti reports. They were demobilized as late as November 2022 by the order of President Putin. In the winter of 2023, Russia passed a law that allowed mobilized students from LPR and DPR to have their tuition waived after their military service was over.

In his conversation with Bereg, a Donetsk National Medical University student Alexei Yurov (name changed for security considerations) said that his university’s management was more “lenient” than the president of DonSU. In his words, student group leaders sent warnings in group chats asking junior students to stay at home. The request to spread such messages allegedly came directly from the dean’s office.

“The management even tried to get some military deferrals for medical students, so that they don’t get mobilized”, says Yurov. Still, some of the students got drafted nevertheless, says Alexei.

A last-year student Sergey told Novaya Gazeta that in March, he and his peers were contacted by the dean’s office and asked to show up at the military recruiting office in order to, supposedly, receive a document confirming that they “can’t be drafted.” Sergey then says that his fellow students who did show up at the office were enlisted as volunteers and immediately mobilized.

In the first months of the full-scale invasion, Russians occupied universities in the Zaporizhia region, Kherson, and Mariupol. Local faculty, just like their colleagues from Donbas, got evacuated and continued their work on Ukraine-controlled territories.

In the first months of the war, Russian forces occupied Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhia regions and appointed their own administrations, including at universities. In most cases, the new university presidents were former professors at Ukrainian universities who supported the Russian government.

Melitopol was occupied in the first days of the war. Natalia Falko, acting president of Ukraine’s Bogdan Khmelnytskyi Melitopol State Pedagogical University (MSPU), told Bereg that at the beginning of the occupation, the university’s employees expected the new “authorities” not to take over the university until summer, right before the start of the new school year. In the meantime, they were hoping to transfer all the university’s documents into a digital format.

In March 2022, already under occupation, elections of a new MSPU president got underway. Natalia Falko says that Lyudmila Moskalyova, now acting vice president for scientific work, supported the occupation authorities but did not tell her colleagues. In March, after discovering that the university had been excluded from the Ukrainian register of higher educational institutions, MSPU’s faculty assumed that Moskalyova had been cooperating with the occupation authorities. Then, an initiative group led by Falko, who by then had already moved to Ukrainian-controlled territories, initiated steps to move the university to Zaporizhzhia.

In May 2022, the Russian authorities established their own MSU — Makarenko Melitopol State University — in the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Under its umbrella, they merged four former Ukrainian universities of the Zaporizhzhia region, including MSPU. As president of the new unified university they appointed a former teacher of the Kharkiv National University of Internal Affairs Andriy Chuikov, a police lieutenant colonel who had resigned in 2014 and supported the separatists. He was replaced by Nikolai Toivonen in June 2023.

At the end of May, Falko recounts, MSPU’s faculty were gathered in the university auditorium and given a choice: to either submit a resignation letter or continue working for the university by applying for a position at MSU.

“When we now hear that the people [who continued working at the Russian-controlled universities] had no choice, that they wrote their [job] applications at gunpoint, that’s all untrue. Because they were given a choice,” Falko believes.

At the same time, the university president calls the requirement to submit a resignation letter from a “Russian” university, where the faculty members were not employed at the time, a “legal absurdity”.

Before the occupation, MSPU was ranked among the best universities in Ukraine. According to Falko, after the evacuation the university “not only survived but is successfully developing:” it climbed eight positions in the ranking of Ukrainian universities based on Scopus metrics and is developing Erasmus+ programs.

Another university taken over by the occupation authorities was Kherson State University. In mid-June 2022, its president, Alexander Spivakovsky, announced that the university’s building had been seized. In July, the new “management” established a Telegram channel for the now Russian Kherson State University. As its president they appointed Tatiana Tomilina, the university’s former lecturer who had resigned in 2015. After her resignation, Tomilina had claimed that an American “secret biological laboratory for highly dangerous infections” was operating in central Kherson.

To get the new universities up and running, Russian-controlled administrations needed to enroll students. They admitted students without exams and allowed them to enroll in multiple programs simultaneously. Additionally, those who already had higher education were permitted to study tuition-free.

During the admission campaigns of 2022 and 2023, “Russian” universities resorted to all possible methods to recruit students: almost everywhere, applicants were admitted without exams, and tuition-free spots were filled even by those who already had higher education. Applicants to Kherson Agricultural University were offered the opportunity to enroll in two programs simultaneously: one for full-time study; the other one part-time study.

One student at Kherson Technical University, who asked to remain anonymous, told Bereg that teaching at the university now happens in group chats where professors send lecture materials and assignments. In her words, there is enough time for all lectures even if you are studying for two degrees simultaneously. This is also confirmed by the Admissions Committee.

Despite these privileges and simplified entry requirements, in both 2022 and 2023, the session of the admission committees in the “new” higher education institutions was extended several times, likely because they were struggling to reach the necessary number of students. In early 2022, applicants to the Melitopol State University (MSU) complained in the university’s group on VKontakte that they don’t know whether they have been admitted and said that they don’t understand when classes are scheduled to get started. Some insisted that they couldn’t reach the admission committee over the phone.

The new higher education institutions recruited not only first-year students but also students of higher years from other Russian universities: they were offered to continue their education on the occupied territories tuition-free, even if they had studied in Russia in a paid program.

In Kherson, the new universities survived only until November: as a result of the 2022 counteroffensive, Ukrainian forces liberated the city. After that, the universities “evacuated” to Russia or other occupied territories.

Naturally, new departments of journalism were opened at the universities that were now under Russian control. At those schools, students are taught methods of information warfare and fighting against “fake news”. They are also urged not to trust “foreign agents”.

After the occupation, the new “Russian” universities started arranging lectures for students about “information warfare” and fighting against “fakes”. In September 2022, a new Department of Journalism and Media Communication was opened at the “Russian” Kherson State University. The university’s president Tatyana Tomilina said that the school had admitted 36 people and that all of them, in her words, worked for the TV company Tavria. Aleksander Malkevich, Director General of the Russian state channel “St. Petersburg”, was appointed head of the Department. BBC News Russian reported that at the outset of the war, Malkevich founded TV companies “Za TV” in Melitopol, “Tavria TV” in Kherson (which operated until the liberation of the city by Ukrainian forces), and “Mariupol 24” in the east of the Donetsk region.

In May 2023, Malkevich showcased his textbook titled “True Russian Journalism for New Regions”. In his Telegram channel, he wrote that Russians faced the consequences of “total Ukrfascist propaganda”, and his textbook would remind students and experts about “how a true journalist should operate”. The manual begins with a foreword by Tatiana Tomilina, in which she talks about how Ukraine lost its sovereignty in 2005, and that freedom of speech was “attacked by unscrupulous interested parties”.

In April 2022, the lecturers of journalism from the DPR, LPR, and Russia held an online conference at which they discussed topics such as “manipulation of public opinion by Western and Ukrainian media”, “how to expose fakes about the Special Military Operation” and the information war. A month later, “Russian” DonSU organized a workshop on “combating fake information in the media” for its students. Additionally, a media forum was organized for students of Melitopol University, with pro-Russian “military correspondents” as guest speakers. Following this event, the university’s management announced that the students were ready to “join the ranks of information fighters”.

The multimedia center at “Russian” DonSU was opened as far back as 2016, just two years after the university itself began its operations. The goals of the center, as formulated by its president Svetlana Bespalova, were “to promote the ideology of the Russian world and spread the Russian language, culture as well as the spiritual and aesthetic traditions of Russia”. In March 2022, Bespalova declared that a “total” war was “being waged against us today, against the Russian world, and against all honest people on the planet” whose main front was the “informational and ideological confrontation”.

Also in 2022, the same university launched an “information security” program. The university staff call students in this program “cadets”. At the end of the year, a new member joined the department: a raccoon named Kherson.

The university reported that “[the raccoon] fought his way out of Kherson and stayed with the Russian paratroopers to defend his hometown from Ukrainian Nazis. He applied to study at our university.”

This was the same raccoon that was previously stolen from the Kherson Zoo by Oleg Zubkov, owner of the Taigan Safari Park in Crimea.

In 2023, a journalism student at “Russian” DonSU defended her thesis on “the use of manipulative technologies in the media during a military conflict” (a video recording of the examination is available to Groza’s editorial staff). Analyzing the videos showing the bodies of civilians killed in Bucha (recorded after Russian troops withdrew from the area in March 2022), she argued that the people in them were supposedly moving and started getting up toward the end of the recording. The examination committee did not contradict her. When the student mentioned the Russian oppositional media Meduza, one of the examiners commented that it is banned in Russia and claimed that Meduza is “funded by European countries” and works to “discredit” Russia in the eyes of its citizens.

The management of some universities in the occupied territories forces students to join “patriotic” organizations

In conversation with Bereg, a former DonNU student Maxim Pavlov said that direct propaganda at “Russian” universities does not have an effect on all students:

During his studies, Pavlov thought that his fellow countrymen felt like they “fell captive to tasteless bandits”, but now he is convinced that his classmates did not care: “When [after the breakout of the full-scale war] they were asked to attend rallies or give interviews to Russian media, they did it.”

Maxim was admitted to the School of Journalism at DonSU in 2018. Since he did not pass either the Ukrainian state exams nor the Russian Unified State Exam, it was easier for him to get admitted to a university in his native Donetsk: there, applicants were only required to provide the results of their final school exams.

According to Maxim, he “always hated the DPR” and after graduation he wanted to move away from there to the Ukrainian-controlled territories because the very first day the new authorities “took away his city’s destiny and turned it into a powerless dump with no future”.

But after the full-scale war had broken out, the student changed his mind about pursuing graduation there. He dropped out and left Donetsk.

Pavlov recalls that at Freshman Day in 2018, students were shown a film where several Ukrainian flags were assembled into a swastika (two other students told Bereg that they were also present at the showing of this film). “The hall, of course, laughed,” says a former student. “But we just didn’t realize that it looked very serious to the teachers. At the time, there was a feeling that showing us such things was a stupid order from incompetent high-ups.” According to Pavlov, to succeed at the university, it was necessary to write pro-Russian research papers and attend “patriotic conferences”. “There is only one opinion on contentious issues [at the university],” Maxim adds, “and these questions are asked almost every day.”

Dmytriy Milov, a former student of Donetsk National University, recalls how in 2021 the dean of his school gathered students and demanded that they join the “Young Republic” organization. “I didn’t want to join because of my political views. I approached the dean and asked him to work out some other way,” Milov says. The dean replied that if a student did not join the youth organization, he would not pass the exam session. And that’s what actually happened. DonSU did not respond to Bereg’s request for comment at the time of this writing.

Milov remarks that “patriotic” events were often held at his university even before the full-scale war broke out. Aleksey Yuriev, a former student at Donetsk Medical University, recalls that it was possible to avoid taking part in them at his university: “We were informed [about the events] and were told that it was desirable to attend them. But we were not directly forced to attend them.”

Some students perceive “patriotic” events as an opportunity to fulfill themselves. Anna (name changed at her request), a student at Melitopol State University, said in a conversation with Bereg that participants of the youth movement “We Are Together” can travel for free to forums and events taking place in Russia. The student herself traveled to the “Student Spring” program (a Russian government program for the support and development of youth creativity), which was held in Perm (a city near the Ural Mountains) and Khanty-Mansiysk (a city in Siberia) in 2023.

A Bereg correspondent called the admission office of Kherson Technical University and, posing as an applicant, asked whether students actively participate in patriotic events. “It is difficult to gather people,” the university replied.

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Ukrainian universities that have moved to other parts of Ukraine — to Ivano-Frankivsk, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhia — continue their work. The administration of Kherson State University is now based in Ivano-Frankivsk and publishes weekly reports on its work. This year students are offered to study remotely, but there is also the possibility of offline tutoring — if the student happens to be in the same city as the teacher.

In the spring of 2023, a post appeared on the university’s Instagram page saying: “We will definitely bring everything back to Kherson as soon as the security situation allows. Until then, we are doing everything we can to continue working to the full extent.”