Russia is teaching its children to fight the wars of the future

Students returning to Russian schools next week will discover a change to their civics courses that puts military training at the heart of the lessons.

The mandatory classes for teenagers include learning about the main types of armaments including machine guns, anti-tank weapons and hand grenades, as well as emergency field medicine and general military discipline. While some of the skills were previously taught in limited high school modules, the new version escalates this training for children as young as 13.

The revamped curriculum ordered by the Education Ministry requires half of weekly classes in the “Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland” course to focus on basic military training. It’s part of a creeping militarization of Russia’s schools intended to shape the next generation of army recruits as the Kremlin continues the war in Ukraine that’s now in its fifth year.

“The romanticization of war and violence, combined with a constant fear of external enemies, instills in young people the idea that human life holds no value and that dying for the regime and the president is normal,” said Pavel Talankin, an exiled Russian teacher who co-directed the Oscar-winning documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin that focused on rising war propaganda in his school. “If necessary, one must die for the motherland, taking up the flag and marching into the line of fire without asking questions.”

As well as instruction on weapons and battlefield tactics, the basic military training covers lessons on Russia’s national security doctrine and the structure of the armed forces. Students will also study mines and explosive hazards, first aid for combat injuries, chemical and radiation exposure and acute stress, as well as survival training and procedures for operating in conflict zones.

The educational overhaul effectively helps create a stream of potential recruits from the classroom to the army. It’s backed up by deployment of battlefield veterans from the war in Ukraine into schools and kindergartens to speak to children in support of President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the 2022 full-scale invasion.

Russia seeks about 400,000 new recruits each year for the war that’s already created more than 1.5 million killed and wounded in the army, according to western estimates.

State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin wants veterans of the war in Ukraine to be placed in “every single school” to teach children in subjects related to their military experience. “Their qualities should be put to use in educating children,” he told university students in Krasnodar in September 2025, pointing to his own Soviet childhood when veterans of World War II were present in schools.

In the Soviet Union, basic military training was compulsory in schools including gas mask drills, march practice, and rifle assembly. Communist authorities framed military readiness as a deterrent against foreign aggression so that the catastrophe of the Nazi German invasion in World War II, which cost an estimated 27 million Soviet lives to defeat, would never happen again.

“Back then, people feared war, and there was propaganda for peace everywhere, so that war would not happen again,” said Irina Lukyanova, a teacher and researcher who studies trends in Russia’s education system. “But now the ideology is militarism.”

Volodin’s wish is already close to being fulfilled. A survey of more than 2,600 Russian school leaders and teachers conducted by the state-sponsored Knowledge Society (Znanie) found that 95% of schools host events dedicated to the war in Ukraine, more than 80% invite combatants to speak to students, and nearly 75% run special lessons about the war.

The classroom pipeline feeds directly into Russia’s conscription system, which requires all 18-year-old men to complete one year’s military service, though in reality many avoid or delay being drafted. While the army can’t send conscripts to Ukraine, enlistment officers and military instructors pressure young draftees to sign lucrative professional contracts early in their training, making them eligible to be sent to fight in the war.

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Outside the classroom, Russia has revived and modernized Soviet-era youth military games called “Zarnitsa” (Summer Lightning). Organized by the state-backed “Movement of the First” youth group, children are organized into 10-person squads with different military specialties, including commanders, stormtroopers, drone operators, sappers, and medics, undertaking combat simulation training using laser-tag gear, VR flight simulators, trench maneuvers, and assault rifle mockups.

Participation in the program has grown from 800,000 children aged from 7 to 17 years in 2024 to an expected 2.5 million this year. The youth organization overseeing the games receives annual funding of about 20 billion rubles ($233 million) from the federal budget.

High school boys are also offered week-long barracks-style field training at state-run ‘Avangard’ military centers — a nationwide network spanning over 70 facilities backed by tens of billions of rubles in state funding. Authorities in Russia’s far eastern Primorye region have opened specialized summer military camps for 14-to-17-year-olds with names like ‘Stormtrooper’ and ‘Infantryman.’

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Russia’s federal budget has allocated a record 70 billion rubles this year for “patriotic education” through the national project “Youth and Children” — a twenty-fold increase since 2021. Meanwhile, enrollment in formal military cadet schools and specialized recruitment tracks reached 780,000 students by 2025, up from 200,000 in 2018.

Russian schools all start the new academic year on Sept. 1, known as the Day of Knowledge. Putin has marked the occasion in recent years by leading a lesson with children called “Conversations About Important Things.”

The obligatory weekly hour-long class was introduced in September 2022 to promote the Kremlin’s views on patriotism and Russian history including the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An adapted version based on play is being introduced in kindergartens this year for pre-school children.

In the Russian-occupied areas of eastern and southern Ukraine, there’s a wholesale revision of education in schools that amounts to cultural erasure. New state-approved history textbooks introduced this year will teach children in Moscow-controlled parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions that their land was always Russian.

“The entire system has been reshuffled to normalize the war,” said Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian anthropologist and researcher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. “The state is preparing young people to accept the battlefield as their primary civic destination.”

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