A new textbook was presented in Moscow that compares Russia's war in Ukraine to the Soviet fight against the Nazis and claims that Russia was "forced" to send troops to Ukraine, reports "Reuters".
President Vladimir Putin presents the war, which Moscow officially calls a "special military operation", as a difficult but necessary battle against Ukraine, a country supported by the West and NATO. He argues that this is part of a broader existential struggle against a decadent West that is trying to weaken and divide Russia.
For its part, Ukraine and its Western allies point out that Russia is waging a brutal and unprovoked war simply to gain territory.
The three-volume "Military History of Russia" is edited by Vladimir Medinsky, a Putin aide who led a delegation that held failed peace talks with Ukraine in 2022, in the early months of the war, and is now a co-author of Russia's main history textbook.
The third volume, which is likely to be dismissed by Ukraine's leadership as propaganda, is intended for children aged 15 and over.
It explains why the Kremlin believes the war began and how it is being fought, highlights what it considers to be instances of battlefield heroism, and describes how the modern Russian army sometimes uses techniques also employed by the Soviet army during World War II.
In a chapter titled "Professionalism, Resilience, and Courage: Russian Troops in Special Warfare", the book tells students that Russia was "forced" to send troops to Ukraine in 2022.
It notes that the West has ignored Russia's security concerns for years - a reference to NATO's eastward expansion and what the book describes as the Western-backed overthrow of a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president in 2014, which turned Ukraine into an "aggressive anti-Russian bridgehead".
NATO and Ukraine deny posing a threat to Russia.
During a discussion of the new book, Ivan Basik, a military historian with ties to the Russian military, said that the actions of the West and Ukraine had made war "inevitable".
"The most important task was to explain to the younger generation, to schoolchildren, the forced nature of the special military operation being conducted by the Russian Federation", he stressed.