Russian-speaking students pay heavy price

In a suburb of Aachen, in the west of Germany, Alex Ebert, 11, was on the bus back from school, his mother said, when four boys told him that he was killing Ukrainian children.

One of them, who he told her had pushed him the week before and called him a slur used for Russians, slammed Alex’s head into the window and kicked him in the stomach and back.

Alex, who speaks Russian because his parents are from Kazakhstan, got out at a bus stop and sat on the ground until strangers in a car stopped and picked him up.

“He was crying and hurting,” said his mother, Svetlana

Ebert. “He doesn’t understand what he has to do with it.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion has killed hundreds of Ukrainian children, orphaned many more and displaced millions, and wrecked homes and schools.

But it has also crept into the lives of Russian-speaking children across Europe, who have found themselves paying for Putin’s aggression in humiliation, harassment and bullying — another perverse effect of a war that is overwhelmingly affecting the innocent.

“This problem is growing every day,” said Carsten Stahl, Germany’s most prominent anti-bullying activist, who said he had received scores of reports of bullying of Russian-speaking students. “I’m very angry and very ashamed.”

In classrooms around Europe, children bewildered by the war have asked questions and gotten answers.

But as their governments have sought to isolate Russia both culturally and politically, they have also poured out their fears, and sometimes looked for culprits or mimicked adults’ hostility, with the risk of creating new breeding grounds for violence and intimidation in a continent that is once again enduring war.

“If we put it in their head that it is OK to hate and bully, it stays for a very long time,” Stahl said. “Children are the mirror of our society.”