“We thought that most of the attacks on schools were related to the fact that they might have been somehow connected with the Ukrainian military. But it’s not so. We noticed that the trend is somewhat different.”

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukrainian human rights defenders of the Educational House of Human Rights in Chernihiv have been engaged in documenting war crimes committed by Russians in Ukraine.

Among other things, activists, together with law enforcement officers, are collecting facts about attacks by the Russian military on educational institutions. In particular, they have already documented 80 cases of such crimes: mostly all of them took place in Chernihiv Oblast (a few more in Kherson Oblast and Sumy Oblast).

While investigating these war crimes, human rights defenders singled out separate groups of crimes related to educational institutions. For example, when schools were purposefully and deliberately destroyed, or when schools were used as human shields, holding hostages or settling their soldiers there. There were also simply cases of looting and destruction of civilian property.

Read more in the article about how and why the Russians were killing education in Chernihiv Oblast.