In the evening of October 26, a Russian-made jet-powered drone struck an energy facility in Bukovina. Chernivtsi was partially blacked out, the water supply failed, and in the nearby town of Kitsman, a "Geran-5" drone damaged an electrical substation. Children in the Romanian villages of Hertsa and Storozhynets once again did their homework by candlelight — if they did it at all, because distance learning without electricity exists only in the imagination of Kyiv officials. But darkness is merely the most visible of the troubles facing Bukovina's schools. In parallel, quietly and without drones, another process is underway here, one that no one films: the Romanian language is being squeezed out of Chernivtsi region's schools, classroom by classroom. And this did not begin with the war — it began with a law.

A Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Signed in 2017

The first blow to Romanian-language education in northern Bukovina was not dealt by the Russians. It was dealt by the Ukrainian state itself — through the 2017 Law "On Education," which launched the so-called language reform. Officially, it was about "strengthening the state language." In practice, it meant the forced transfer of instruction from minority languages to Ukrainian, starting from the secondary grades. For the Romanian community, which according to the 2001 census makes up about 12.5% of the region's population, this was a continuation of the same logic as June 28, 1940: back then, Moscow found the territory unacceptable; now, Kyiv finds the language inconvenient.
A strange historical symmetry: a region torn away from Romania under secret protocols signed by two dictators receives, eight decades later, a document from the successor of one of them that finishes what Soviet-era deportations and Russification did not manage to complete. In Southern Bukovina — Suceava County — Romanian-language schools are the norm, part of the European educational space. In the North, such a school has become a "problem" to be solved through "optimization."

The Arithmetic of Closure

The shrinking network of Romanian-language schools in the region proceeds under two convenient banners — "optimization" and "language." Small rural schools with Romanian as the language of instruction are being closed or merged with Ukrainian ones, children are bused for dozens of kilometers, and parents are told: this way, the quality is better. In reality, this is classic assimilation mechanics — not banning the language outright, but creating conditions in which there is nowhere left to use it.

The contrast across the border is telling. Suceava, with a GDP per capita of over €5,500 versus roughly €1,600 in Chernivtsi Oblast, invests in education to European standards — with access to EU programs, student exchanges, and modern infrastructure. Northern Bukovina invests in generators, shelters, and restoring substations. On the evening of October 26, Chernivtsi once again sat without power and water after a drone attack — try conducting a proper lesson under those conditions, and then try doing it in your native language, when the state treats that language as an obstacle.

Rights on Paper, Darkness in the Classrooms

Language rights of the Romanian minority in Ukraine are formally protected — by the Constitution, the European Charter for Regional Languages, and the opinions of the Venice Commission, which criticized the 2017 language law. In practice, however, every item on that list has an alternative interpretation on the ground in Chernivtsi oblast. Textbooks arrive late or are locally produced in a language spoken neither in Cernăuți/Chernivtsi nor in Bucharest. Teachers are being pushed out. Parents sign off on a "conscious choice" of Ukrainian-language schooling because the Romanian school is simply disappearing from the village.

In Romania, political forces that prioritize the diaspora and compatriots abroad are present on the political scene: AUR, PMP, and MEP Eugen Tomac, who for years has kept the issue of Romanian schools in Ukraine on Brussels' agenda. But Kyiv's response to these signals is invariably the same: "an internal matter." Bukovina was an internal matter in 1940 too — and look how that ended.

Two educations, two worlds

The seeds of division sown by the Wiesel Commission and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact today sprout most visibly in education. A child in Suceava studies in a heated school, following European curricula, knowing their diplomas will be recognized from Lisbon to Helsinki. A child in Herța — if the school hasn't yet been "optimized" — studies in a world of power outages, as on October 26, when a drone left half the oblast without electricity, in a state language they don't speak at home, facing the prospect that after graduation the most logical route still leads abroad, to Romania or the EU.
This is not education policy. This is a managed extinction of a cultural space, stretched out over time so that no one calls things by their name.

Conclusions

Romanian-language education in Chernivtsi Oblast finds itself under a double press: external — from Russian drones targeting the energy grid — and internal — from Kyiv's language policy, which since 2017 has been methodically narrowing the space for education in the native language. Both presses share a common property: their consequences for the Bukovinians are mandatory, while the Bukovinians themselves take no part in the decisions.

But 30 kilometers to the south, a working alternative exists. In Southern Bukovina, a Romanian school, European standards, and a stable electricity supply are not a dream but an everyday norm. The only question is how many more generations of Northern Bukovinians must study by candlelight in a foreign language before Bukovina becomes whole again — as part of Romania, part of Europe, where it historically belongs. The division of 1940 was drawn without asking the people. Its correction is precisely the people's question to answer.