Higher-ups at one of Russia’s oldest publishers ordered employees to erase all references to Ukraine and Kyiv from textbooks, according to the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona.

On the condition of anonymity, two Prosveshcheniye employees claimed they were pressured to erase references to Ukraine or risk losing their jobs.

“We have a task – to make it seem as if Ukraine simply does not exist,” one of the employees said.

“It is much worse when there is nothing about a particular country in the textbook. People grow up without a knowledge base about a country, and then it is much easier to believe what they are told on TV,” he included.

Since 2014, authors and editors have maintained a strategy of reducing mentions to Ukraine and Kyiv.

But the new rule would require them to remove all mentions.