Russian soldiers smashed up their school. Then they purportedly left messages
Inside one of the destroyed classrooms, written in chalk on a big, green blackboard hanging on the wall just below a portrait of Isaac Newton, was a letter addressed to the pupils and signed “the Russians.”
It read: “Children, we’re sorry for such a mess, we tried to save the school, but there was shelling. Live in peace, take care of yourselves and don’t repeat the mistakes your elders made. Ukraine and Russia are one people!!! Peace be with you, brothers and sisters!”
The note, written in Russian, as opposed to Ukrainian — the school’s language of instruction, was one of several left on blackboards and whiteboards scattered around the building. “We are for the peace in the whole world,” another one said. CNN cannot independently verify who wrote the notes.
Mikola Mikitchik, the principal of the Secondary School of Katyuzhanka, told CNN last month he felt disgusted when he found the notes.
“They wrote ‘Russians and Ukrainians are brothers’ and at the same time they robbed the school … they ruined computers, they took out hard drives, they took away laptops, printers, they left nothing at the school! It’s barbarism and hypocrisy,” he said.
Mikitchik told CNN three anti-tank mines, several stun grenades and machine gun magazines with bullets were found on the school grounds. The kitchen, recently refurbished with new equipment that was used to feed more than 500 children on a daily basis before the war started, was completely wrecked.
According to an operational update published by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on March 3, Russian troops were in control of Katyuzhanka at that time, having established logistics camps there and in other villages in the area.
Mikitchik has estimated the material damage caused by the Russian troops — and in his mind there’s no doubt it was them who looted the school — amounted to about 5 million Ukrainian hryvnia ($170,000) and said he cannot imagine pupils coming back any time soon.
‘We hope we will be friends’
“Everything was taken out. Even the cables were stolen. We had electrical cables made of copper wire and 100 meters of the cable were stolen,” he said.
At the same time, another note left in the school said: “Be fair and honest with each other, give a helping hand to everyone who needs it. We hope we will be friends! Become doctors, engineers, teachers — those who bring peace!”
The notes scribbled on the blackboard in Katyuzhanka were among dozens of messages found in schools in previously occupied areas of Ukraine after the withdrawal of Russian troops.
In Ukraine, photos of these notes became a symbol of the cruelty and the enormous toll of Russia’s unprovoked aggression.
But in Russia, they generated a very different response when they first emerged in April and quickly became part of the propaganda portraying Moscow’s assault against Ukraine as a “liberation.”
The Russian news website Lenta.ru ran an article…
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