A new subject has appeared in Russian schools — "Fundamentals of Security and Homeland Defense" (FSHD). According to the Ministry of Education, teaching it requires a lot of expensive equipment, which schools often cannot purchase on their own. Then the prosecutor's office gets involved.
In 2024, as a result of inspections, Russian prosecutors filed nearly 200 lawsuits against schools demanding they equip classrooms for conducting FSHD and FSHD, calculated "Verstka"*.
The prosecutor's office in 21 regions went to court, which in most cases sided with the supervisory authority. Only in 14 cases did the prosecutor's office lose in the first instance. Proceedings in one case were terminated, and in eight cases, prosecutors withdrew the lawsuits because the defendants purchased the necessary equipment before the trial. All other lawsuits were fully or partially satisfied.
From some schools, prosecutors only demanded the equipment of a shooting range or the installation of an electronic shooting simulator, but in some cases, they did not stop there, demanding the installation of gun safes, the purchase of sets of mass-dimensional models of weapons, magazines for the Kalashnikov rifle with training cartridges, mock-ups of F-1 and RGD-5 grenades, wound and injury simulators for a mannequin trainer, oxygen and toxic gas analyzers.
In the lawsuits, the prosecutor's office referred to the violation not only of the rights of teenagers but also of the law on military service, arguing their demands by stating that preparation for the army begins at school, and for this, special equipment is needed. In Krasnodar, the local prosecutor considered that the absence of a shooting range in Gymnasium No. 33 "may have negative consequences in the field of military-patriotic and spiritual-moral education of minors".
In some cases, judges went even further: in the Penza region, a judge noted in the decision that the rights to "free personal development, fostering mutual respect, diligence, citizenship, patriotism, responsibility" were being infringed.
The equipment requested by the prosecutor's office is estimated by the schools themselves to cost hundreds of thousands of rubles. Meanwhile, in courts, several schools presented letters from the Ministry of Education indicating that the schools do not have such amounts in their accounts, but this did not convince the courts.
Meanwhile, schools spend millions of rubles on the purchase of mini-laboratories for radiation-chemical reconnaissance and quadcopters, which are included in the Ministry of Education's list for teaching FSHD. As "Verstka" found out, in 2024, schools spent at least 5.27 million rubles on laboratories and no less than 195 million on quadcopters.
The most purchases were made in the Vologda, Voronezh, Kemerovo, Irkutsk regions, Primorsky Krai, and YANAO. Meanwhile, the Irkutsk region purchased several drones at once through one lot, sometimes even several dozen. In total, in 2024, the region spent more than 109.3 million rubles on this.
* Recognized in Russia as a "foreign agent".