"When I dream about going back, I'm scared I might say something in Ukrainian": how the most everyday things become perilous under occupation

Russian occupying forces make Ukrainians afraid of the simplest things: their language, books and national symbols, and their own beliefs. People living under occupation can be tortured for having a tattoo of the Ukrainian flag, fined for listening to Ukrainian music, and imprisoned for "discrediting the Russian Armed Forces". Driven into a corner by interrogations, searches and harassment, people often have no choice. Nothing must betray their Ukrainian identity or their connection to their pre-war lives in Ukraine.

Things that were once part of everyday life have become fraught with risk, turning their owners into obvious targets for the Russian military. That is why under occupation, Ukrainian history textbooks are buried in the ground, flags are hidden in preserving jars, and books are burned in furnaces.

Here we bring you the stories of three Ukrainian teachers from the occupied territories. The Russians have taken away their homes, but not their identity. These women tell us about the things they have lost and their attempts to find themselves again.

Svitlana: burying

Svitlana picked up the blue-and-yellow flag from the ground. It was stained with oil and still bore tyre tracks from Russian military vehicles.

"They drove over it," she sighs. The flag had flown outside the school where Svitlana had spent her entire life: first as a student, then in her first and only job, and eventually as headteacher. She used to ask the school's star students to raise the flag on the tallest flagpole in the village.

Svitlana tucked the flag under her jacket. She did not yet feel she was holding something that could provoke anger and violence from the Russians. These were the early weeks of the occupation of her village in Luhansk Oblast. She still thought of herself as one who belonged there, on her own land.

"I took it because it felt like something very dear and sacred. Something I had to protect," she says.

Svitlana's school, now packed full of Russian soldiers and reeking of unwashed bodies, was becoming unrecognisable. Russian military vehicles were dug in among the chestnut trees and flowerbeds in the school grounds.

Svitlana hurried home and stuffed the flag into a bottom drawer, covering it with clothes. Why did she hide it? She doesn't know. It didn't occur to her to hide her son's military uniform in the same way.

During the first few weeks of the occupation, Russian soldiers would often go into people's homes in Svitlana's village, but mostly to ask questions rather than conduct searches. They were not yet turning drawers inside out. A month later, uniformed men carrying assault rifles entered every house on Svitlana's street.

Outside her house, before she could even get inside, Svitlana was met with blows and shouts. "You're one cocky headteacher! You took the flag from the school!" Then things went flying out of the chest of drawers: first the top drawer, then the middle one. Her daughter-in-law was screaming and retching with fear. They found the military uniform. They took Svitlana's husband to the school, forced him to call their son, beat him up, and dumped him by the roadside.

After that, Svitlana's daughter-in-law begged her to bury the flag. She kept saying that next time they would all be killed because of it.

The place Svitlana chose for the flag was not in the vegetable garden, but between the house and the cellar. Somehow it seemed safer there. The soil in the village was black as tar, soft and yielding. Vegetables grew there in abundance. But now, instead of the seeds she had sown in that soil for decades, Svitlana was planting a jar that contained a blue-and-yellow flag.

"I hope it's still there," she says today, a note of doubt in her voice. Since she left her home and fled, the house has been damaged by attacks. The school has been hit too. The village is now in the grey zone, an active combat area.

"There is no village anymore," Svitlana was eventually told at a Ukrainian government institution.

"But I want to go back," she says wistfully. "To dig up that flag. I went on a trip for Teachers' Day recently. My colleagues had flags with them. And I thought: why haven't I bought one for myself yet, so I can travel around Ukraine with it? Maybe it's because deep down, I know I already have one?"

Natalia: hiding

"My parents built our house," says Natalia, a teacher of Ukrainian history from Kherson Oblast. "I was little. I watched the house grow before my eyes like a mushroom. I know every stone and every pipe that remains of it."

Natalia taught at a school not far from her home, in a neighbouring town half an hour away. She took great care over her appearance, wearing dresses and heels to work and styling her long hair in soft curls. "After all, a teacher is the face of the school," she explains.

On the first day of the full-scale war, Natalia locked the door of her rented apartment and went back to her village. She wanted to get through the hardest times together with her mother and sister.

Then the Russian occupation began.

"Up until autumn 2022, our little village had been quite far away from the main fighting. People stopped driving because their cars were being seized. The village was quiet and relatively calm, apart from regular raids by Russian soldiers. I realised that someone who taught Ukrainian history might also be of interest to them. So I had to make sure there was nothing in my behaviour, appearance or words that would attract their attention."

So she tied her hair back. She wore an old headscarf and trousers that concealed her figure rather than accentuated it. "I didn't care what my skin looked like, or whether a grey hair had appeared, or a new wrinkle. Under occupation, your goal is to stay alive," Natalia says. "I did my best to look like an ordinary, poorly educated person. You become grey, almost levelled with the ground, cowed into a life of growing vegetables and flowers and cooking. I stopped speaking Ukrainian. No social media posts, no likes, nothing. You don't exist."

Natalia had been doing some research about a soldier she knew who was killed in action in Donbas back in 2014, and had a folder full of material, poems and portraits. She buried it in the garden near the blackberry bushes. She used plenty of plastic wrap, plastic bags and tape: she knew it would all be lying in damp soil. She hoped it wouldn't be there for long.

She kept moving the Ukrainian history textbooks she used with her students further and further away. At first they were in a wardrobe. When the searches began, she hid them near the house so she could get them out for lessons. Then she moved them to the shed. Then to the cellar.

She buried some things further away from the house as her fear steadily grew. Did this new reality surprise her? "Not at all," she says. "This is life under occupation. I'd read about it a lot, and now I was living through it myself."

She left her work chats, and after every lesson she would delete the platform she was using to continue teaching Ukrainian history despite the risk to her life. Now she was doing it secretly, online.

"I worked on the first floor. Only my family knew I was teaching. The desk was by the window, and the window was open because there was no electricity. The sun was the only source of light. You're teaching a lesson and you hear a boom. You count: one, two, three, four… I thought I'd never get rid of that habit. Do you know what I was afraid of? That my students might see me covered in blood."

When the Russians blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, Natalia's village began to sink underwater before her eyes. As the water rose, she rushed to retrieve her documents and books from their hiding places. She was certain the flood wouldn't reach the first floor. She and her family fled to another village. When she returned, she carried everything that had survived out into the yard. "I don't know what I was thinking. There were Russian soldiers all over the place, and there I was, drying books outside," she recalls.

Natalia fled the occupation with her elderly mother, her sister, three cats and three dogs. They had neither the strength nor the space to take books.

She continued to teach online at her school from a city in Ukraine's south. She bought new Ukrainian history textbooks, choosing the same ones she had left behind at home. She no longer has to bury them in the ground or carry them down to the cellar. She doesn't even put them on a bookshelf. "For a teacher, they're like spoons in a kitchen," she says, laughing for the first time since our conversation began. "They should always be to hand."

Oleksandra: burning

"You're asking whether I had a bookshelf at home?" says Oleksandra. "I had over a thousand books on my 'shelf'!" Oleksandra, her husband and their 14-year-old daughter used to live in Luhansk Oblast. She taught Ukrainian language and literature at the village school and, like everyone else in the village, had a plot of land and plenty of work to do "on the land".

Oleksandra's home library was meticulously organised, the books arranged in neat rows. She loved late evenings, when the house fell quiet and she could settle down with a book: "I'd sit down intending to read for a couple of minutes, then finish at five in the morning and realise I wasn't going to get any sleep that night."

The Russians seized her village in February 2022, and within a few months they'd turned the school into a Russian one, clearing out everything to do with Ukraine and putting up Russian flags and portraits of Putin. Oleksandra packed the things she'd accumulated over her years of teaching into a box and took them home. She refused to collaborate with the occupying authorities.

A young teacher was arrested in a neighbouring district. Oleksandra heard that he had been accused of being a Nazi and that banned items and books had apparently been found in his possession. What books, you might ask? Well, it turned out to have been ordinary patriotic literature.

Oleksandra went over to her bookcase. There were several dozen Ukrainian books which had suddenly become dangerous for her to possess. She moved them behind the tightly-packed rows of Russian classics, worrying that she might have missed something.

She was right to worry. During the first search, six armed soldiers spread out through the rooms. Two went straight to the bookcase. They leafed through the Russian literature. In another room, Oleksandra's 14-year-old daughter was explaining why Crimea was shown as part of Ukraine on a map in her textbook. The soldiers were looking for flags. They called Oleksandra a Nazi and said there was no way she didn't have something buried somewhere.

It was a warm night. Her daughter was asleep in her bed now. Oleksandra laid several dozen books out in front of the furnace. Something was gnawing away at her inside. She began to cry. Maybe she should hide them after all, she thought. But how?

"Besides, I didn't know where or how they would search. What if they asked, 'What have you been digging up there?' I had doubts. I was afraid. And I didn't want my child worrying that we had something hidden," she recalls.

It was all done between midnight and 4 am, so that no one would see the smoke and the furnace would be cool by morning. They cut things up and fed the pieces to the flames. A camouflage net they hadn't yet managed to deliver to the Ukrainian military. Children's blue-and-yellow flags she had rescued from the school. Clothes and combat boots she'd been given by soldiers in recognition of her years of volunteering. And the books – they went in whole. The furnace burned as it always did, as reliably as ever. There was no smell. Only ashes remained.

Oleksandra has never asked her husband where he scattered them.

"The next time they searched, they rummaged through everything and pulled everything out. It was a good thing I'd burned the books. But I didn't feel any relief, because they could come up with any excuse for another search. One time they said my husband was a grenade launcher operator and they were looking for a grenade launcher. Another time they said he was a tank crewman. Were they hoping to find a tank? I had no idea what they would come up with next.

They said I was a traitor to the motherland and was facing 12 years in prison. Every day I'd wake up and keep looking out of the window until after five in the evening. The attacks weren't as frightening as waiting for them to come back."

Russian soldiers harassed Oleksandra for three months. They would come to search the house and interrogate her once a week, sometimes twice. She lost 13 kg (27 lb) over that period.

Since leaving for Ukraine's west, she has had a recurring dream: she comes back to her house, of which only the walls remain, and searches for her books. "In the dream, I'm scared because I have to speak Russian – God forbid I say anything in Ukrainian – and I know it's still occupied. I wonder whether the books are still there, because there's been snow and rain. But they're in my bookcase… I wake up and can't remember whether I found them."

Oleksandra has promised herself that she will never collect books again. The ones she burned would be impossible to replace anyway. One of the books she treasured most, about the defence of Donetsk Airport, is no longer in print. Others were rare self-published editions. One of the authors, a serviceman, has been killed in action. Oleksandra managed to contact another one on Facebook. He is serving in the military.

Despite the promise she made to herself, whenever her daughter asks to go to a bookshop, Oleksandra never says no. She always buys something. In her new involuntary temporary home, one constant from her old life has remained: reading.

***

What happened to Oleksandra, Natalia and Svitlana is far from unique.

Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2026 report has rated the occupied territories of Ukraine as the least free in the world. With a score of 1 out of 100, Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territories have fewer political rights and civil liberties than people in Syria, North Korea, Belarus or Turkmenistan.

By comparison, Freedom House rated the part of Ukraine under Kyiv's control as Partly Free, giving it a score of 51 out of 100.

Between February 2022 and January 2024, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented the policy of imposing Russian identity and suppressing expressions of Ukrainian identity in the occupied territories. Russian armed forces have detained people who openly expressed their Ukrainian identity and subjected them to violence.

Teachers have been required to follow the Russian curriculum, use the Russian language, and teach history in a way that justifies Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The report documented the removal from educational institutions of literature deemed "extremist" or "portraying the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism", including comics, textbooks, and literature about the Holodomor .

A report by the same organisation on the human rights situation in Ukraine between June and December 2025 stated that people living under occupation had begun switching to Russian in public spaces when Russian soldiers were nearby. A woman living in occupied Kherson Oblast said that displaying Ukrainian flags or symbols was prohibited. Another woman reported that a Russian soldier had come to her apartment and questioned her about watching a Ukrainian TV channel.

Ordinary objects and everyday actions have become evidence of a crime, forcing people who are trying to survive under occupation to dig graves in which to bury their own past and identity.

Nadiia Shvadchak

Translated by Myroslava Zavadska

Edited by Teresa Pearce

The article was first published by Atlatszo.hu (Hungary) in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers dedicated to documenting and reporting on war crimes and gathering evidence for war crimes investigations.