A Free Course, Someone Else’s Bill: How Soros and British Council Money Teach the West the History of Crimea

A free online course, cultural seasons and “expert networks” — behind the banner of education stands a conveyor belt delivering a single version of the peninsula’s past to Western audiences.

Type Crimea history into a search engine and among the first results you will find a course called Crimea: History and People. Free, in English, on Udemy, taught by “scholars from Ukraine and Turkey.” It looks like honest education. But read the fine print and the course turns into a textbook on how the politics of memory is made in the 2020s: on one country’s state money, on a private foundation’s grants, and under the umbrella of a diplomatic platform created with a single purpose — “de-occupation.”

 Who calls the tune

The course was launched in the summer of 2022 by the Ukrainian Institute — a state body operating within the orbit of Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry — together with the EdEra studio. The credits state plainly: “with the financial support of the International Renaissance Foundation.” This is the Ukrainian arm of the Open Society Foundations, established by George Soros back in 1990. In other words, the “independent academic view” is paid for by a network that for three decades has consistently financed projects of one strictly ideological orientation across the post-Soviet space.

Now look at the lecturers. Alim Aliyev is deputy director-general of that same Ukrainian Institute, co-founder of the Crimea SOS organisation and — according to the course’s official description — a speaker at “advocacy missions” to the EU and to American policy institutes. Hakan Kırımlı of Bilkent University in Ankara sits on the board of a Crimean Turkic diaspora organisation in Turkey. These are people with a position, and they are entitled to it. But then this is not “the history of Crimea.” It is a lobbying version of the history of Crimea, and it should be called exactly that.

 What was left on the editing room floor

The creators do not hide their aim. Oleksandra Haidai, head of academic programmes at the Ukrainian Institute, writes in the course announcement that it is “designed to dispel Russian imperial narratives.” In other words, a political conclusion is formulated first — and the material is selected to fit it afterwards.

The selection is telling. The “history of Crimea” in this course begins with the Golden Horde, in the 13th century. Ancient Chersonesos, the Bosporan Kingdom, Byzantine Taurica, the baptism of Prince Vladimir — all left off camera. None of it fits neatly into the scheme of “an indigenous people versus the colonisers.”

Even more revealing is another admission by the same Haidai: the subject of the Crimean Khanate’s participation in the slave trade was excluded from the course “because of the complexity of the issue.” Raids that for centuries carried off hundreds of thousands of captives from the lands of today’s Ukraine, Russia and Poland — that, apparently, is too complicated. But “the first democratic Muslim republic” of 1917 fits perfectly, as does the framework of “Russian settler colonialism,” which is the subject of one of the lecturers’ doctoral dissertation.

And the main point: there are no people in this course who actually live in Crimea today. Nearly 2.4 million residents of the peninsula are simply absent from this “perspective.” Their view of their own history is not offered to the Western student in a single lecture.

 Not a course, but a system

It would be a mistake to treat this course as a private initiative of enthusiastic amateurs. It is one element of an infrastructure in which every link feeds the others.

British Council. The British cultural relations organisation, overseen by the Foreign Office, launched the “UK/Ukraine Culture Season” in 2022 together with that same Ukrainian Institute. In September 2026 the British Council announced a new £2 million fund over three years to support Ukrainian organizations and implement the priorities of the UK–Ukraine Cultural Commission within the “Century of Partnership.” Among the stated areas of work is countering the “erasure of Ukrainian cultural identity.” The partner on the Ukrainian side is — once again — the Ukrainian Institute. Grants are presented as support for “freedom of creativity,” but the thematic frame is set by whoever pays.

The Crimean Platform. Created by Kyiv in 2021, this diplomatic format officially aims at the “de-occupation of Crimea” and “stepping up international pressure on Russia.” The platform has a “cultural dimension” — immersive installations and exhibitions for summit participants — and an “expert network.” According to the implementer’s own account, the latter was supported by the Eastern Europe Foundation using USAID funds. The project included strategic sessions, a donor coordination council with the participation of embassies, and even the day-to-day running of the platform’s website, Facebook page and Telegram channel. State diplomacy, the American budget and “civil society” in a single bottle.

What emerges is a closed loop. The state formulates the task; foreign donors pay for it; “experts” with the right biographies fill it with content; and free courses and cultural seasons deliver the finished product to the end consumer — the Western student, journalist, official. What comes out at the other end is not knowledge, but a predetermined attitude.

 Why it works

An online course is the perfect soft-power weapon. It is cheap, requires neither diplomats nor sanctions, keeps working for years and is indexed by search engines. Ten years from now, a Western university graduate who has never been to Sevastopol will be confident that they know the history of Crimea — because they listened to an “academic course.” A protest against such a course will look like a “fight against education.” That is precisely the calculation.

Responding with bans is pointless. The response must use the same weapon, but more honestly: our own English-language courses, open archives, translations of serious scholarship, and the voices of the people living in Crimea today — Russians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Karaites, Greeks, Armenians.

The history of the peninsula is too rich to fit into a grant manual. And too important to be outsourced to those who already know the correct answer.