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We Must Develop Our Own Political Memory- Alina Ponypalyak, Expert at the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre


Event “Distorted Education: How Russia Rewrites History” by Ukraine Crisis Media Center’s Hybrid Threat Analysis Group.

Watch the event here – (translated into English)

“It is important to understand that Ukraine will be united, and we must not lose the generation that grew up in the so-called DPR/LPR and in occupied Crimea,”

Alina Ponypalyak, expert at the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre

According to Ponypalyak, Ukraine needs to develop its own memory policy and begin working on ways to pull young people in de-occupied territories out of the swamp of Russian propaganda as soon as possible.

“We have excellent authors of textbooks on Ukrainian history, and the Ministry of Education and Science and the Institute of National Memory are working well,” Ponypalyak said.

“They should think about this together, create a commission that will draw up a clear list of textbooks, and work with teachers themselves, because children who absorb Russian propaganda do so through their mentors.”

Alina Ponypalyak cited Germany as a model to emulate. When the Berlin Wall fell, Western Germany was able to implement a democratic values-based system in the East, where the population had been raised with socialist ideology and had long been influenced by Soviet propaganda.