Authorities in Moscow have unveiled a new school textbook that aims to justify the war in Ukraine and accuses the West of trying to destroy Russia, the BBC reports.

According to excerpts published by Russian media, students will now be taught that human civilization could have ended if Vladimir Putin had not launched his “special military operation” against Ukraine.

The manual, called “Russian History, 1945 – early 21st century”was drafted by presidential adviser Vladimir Medinsky, a former minister of culture of Russia.

This is the first officially approved history book used in Russian schools that covers events as recent as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

From September, it will be studied in the last year of secondary education in Russia, the 11th gradewhich is attended by students aged 17-18.

The manual claims that “the West is committed to destabilizing the situation in Russia” and to achieve this goal, Western powers have spread “overt Russophobia».

Then, he continues, they began to “drag” Russia into various conflicts. The West’s ultimate goal is to destroy Russia and take control of its mineral wealth, the textbook says.

It repeats numerous clichés from Kremlin propaganda, portraying Ukraine as an aggressive state run by nationalist extremists and manipulated by the West, which is allegedly using the country as a battering ram against Russia.

According to the book, Ukraine is nothing more than a Western invention created to criticize Russiaand even the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine is supposedly invented by the Austrians who wanted to convince the Ukrainians that they are different from the Russians.

The textbook is also distorting the facts and aiming at manipulation. For example, he describes Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 as a popular uprising by residents of eastern Donbas who “wanted to remain Russian” and were joined by “volunteers” from Russia. It makes no mention of the military hardware and personnel Russia sent to Donbass at that time or over the next eight years.

He argues that a key reason for the full-scale invasion in 2022 was the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO.

If Ukraine had joined the alliance and then “provoked a conflict in Crimea or Donbas,” the manual says, Russia would be forced to wage war against the entire NATO alliance.

“This would potentially be the end of civilization. This could not be allowed to happen,” the textbook says. However, Ukraine’s NATO membership was then – and remains now – a distant prospect.

The manual also falsely claims that before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukraine had plans to turn Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, on a NAT baseAnd that later Kiev said it wanted to acquire nuclear weapons.

Another false claim in the textbook is that as of 2014, 80% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian their mother tongue. According to a poll published by the prestigious Razumkov Center in 2006, only 30% of Ukrainians named Russian as their mother tongue, while 52 said that Ukrainian was their mother tongue.

In an apparent reference to the abundance of online material implicating Russian forces in atrocities committed in Ukraine, the textbook warns students to beware of “a global industry producing staged clips and fake photos and videos.”

“Western social networks and mass media spread fake information very enthusiastically,” the manual says in a chapter on “special military operation”.

The manual criticizes the Western sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and portrays them as an attempt to “destroy the Russian economy”. He also wrongly claims that these sanctions “violate all the rules of international law that the West is so fond of invoking.”

At the same time, the exodus of Western businesses from Russia in the wake of the large-scale invasion is presented as a “fantastic opportunity” for Russian businessmen.