A map of Ukraine without Crimea in a textbook: Shmyhal says this is a signal to investigate
Kyiv • UNN
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced the need to investigate the incident with the textbook, which does not show Crimea on the map of Ukraine. The Ministry of Education and Science and the publishing house admitted the mistake, and the textbooks will be reprinted.
Commenting on the situation with the Ukrainian language textbook, which depicts a map of Ukraine without Crimea, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that this is a signal to conduct an investigation and jointly with the Minister of Education to understand this incident. He said this at a press conference on the results of the government's work, reports UNN.
Asked how it happened that the textbooks recommended by the Ministry of Education have such errors as the absence of Crimea on the map of Ukraine, Shmyhal replied: “We have no doubt that Crimea is Ukraine. All of our territories will be de-occupied and Ukraine, as a sovereign, independent state, will restore its territorial integrity within the 1991 borders.
Shmyhal said that this is a Ukrainian strategy, a vision.
Regarding precedents or cases when some mistakes are made, I do not have this data now, but I take your (journalist's - ed.) appeal as a signal to conduct an investigation and, together with the Minister of Education, to look into this incident
Context
Journalist and editor Tetyana Gonchenko drew attention to the fact that school textbooks on the Ukrainian language for the 7th grade (authored by Onatiy A. V., Tkachuk T. P.) contain a map of Ukraine without the occupied Crimea. These textbooks were published in 2024. They are recommended by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.
According to the author of the book, Anastasia Onatiy, this was due to a technical error. She proposed to launch a flash mob “Draw Crimea” because the error cannot be corrected in the printed textbooks.
The Ministry of Education and Science reported that the publisher and the author's team recognized the error and explained its appearance by an oversight during the preparation of the textbook for publication. The image on the photo wall had two layers - a map of Ukraine and Crimea separately. Due to an error in the layout, only one layer of the image was included in the textbook - a map of Ukraine without the peninsula.
The Litera LTD publishing house has undertaken to reprint at its own expense Ukrainian language textbooks for the 7th grade, which contain a map of Ukraine without Crimea.
