A new Russian school textbook tries to justify the war of aggression in Ukraine as students return to classes after the summer holidays, The Guardian reports, according to News.ro.

The New York Times reports that the revised textbook claims that Ukraine is an “ultranationalist state” where “opposition is forbidden” and that the United States is “the main beneficiary of the Ukrainian conflict.”

A rewritten version of the book “History of Russia, from 1945 to the beginning of the 21st century”, a textbook for 16-17-year-old students, almost 30 pages are devoted to the war.

The NYT said the authors formulated it as a response to an “increasingly aggressive West” that wanted to use Ukraine as a “batter” to destroy Russia.

Revised history textbooks for junior high school students will be released next year, RIA Novosti reports.

One of the book’s authors, Volodymyr Medynskyi, is a former Minister of Culture and adviser to President Vladimir Putin. The authors accused the United States of spreading what they called “Russophobia” in the former Soviet republics and of escalating the war in Ukraine, leaving Russia with “no alternative” but to call for a partial mobilization aimed at 300,000 people serving in this country conflict in 2022.

The revised history text is just one of several ways that the war effort affected basic education. The ministries of education and defense have said that starting in 2024, high school students will be required to take a course called “Fundamentals of Defense and Homeland Protection,” which will include limited military training. The boys will learn training, how to use a drone and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and the girls will learn first aid on the battlefield.

Critics called the new textbooks a complete fake. “Instead of history, propaganda is taught in schools,” Russian freelance journalist Anton Orekh wrote in the Telegram messenger.

One example of the textbook’s omissions is its treatment of the Gulags, the infamous labor camps where dictator Joseph Stalin sent countless political prisoners and where millions of Russians died between 1929 and 1953. They are mentioned in parentheses, without a detailed description of their cruelty.

Mykhailo Myagkov, director of the Russian Military Historical Society, praised the new educational materials for offering a more “objective” view of Stalin, whose policies led to a famine that killed an estimated 3-4 million people in Ukraine. The updated manuals portray Stalin as a man who “clearly defended the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union,” Myagkov said.

“Not a word about the truth,” Lyubov Sobol, an oppositionist in exile who cooperates with imprisoned dissident Oleksiy Navalny, wrote on social media.