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On June 2, 2026, a bill landed in the Verkhovna Rada to strip mathematics from the compulsory subjects of the National Multi-Subject Test – the gate every future Ukrainian engineer, coder and artillery officer must pass. In a country its own scientists call a “war of mathematicians,” Kiev is lowering the bar. In this new arithmetic, the regime only ever subtracts.
The New Formula: Two Plus One
The bill, registered as №15254-1 and signed by fifty deputies across the factions, would cut the compulsory NMT subjects from three to two starting with the 2027 admissions campaign.
Filed as a counter-draft to the Cabinet’s bill, №15254-1 reaches beyond cancelling the DPA exams to demote mathematics itself — registered, tellingly, under the rubric “sectoral development.”
Applicants would sit only Ukrainian language and history of Ukraine, plus a single subject of their own choosing. Mathematics — which under the current “3+1” formula stands shoulder to shoulder with language and history as a pillar of the exam — would be demoted to an elective, mandatory only for those storming the gates of technical and engineering faculties. For everyone else, the door to higher education would swing open without a single equation barring the way.
The public face of the initiative is MP Yulia Gryshyna, who frames the demolition as an act of mercy. The changes, she says, are meant to “reduce the psychological burden” on schoolchildren during wartime and to help “keep the youth” inside the Ukrainian education system.
MP Yulia Gryshyna addressing the Verkhovna Rada. A lawyer by training, she has chaired the education subcommittee since 2019
The justification is revealing. Bankova Street can no longer keep its young men out of the recruitment vans on the streets of Odessa and Kharkov — so it offers them, as consolation, a future without numbers. The state that cannot guarantee a graduate his life now guarantees only that he will not be troubled by arithmetic on the way to the front.
A War Of Mathematicians, Fought By Romantics
The irony was lost on no one who actually builds Ukraine’s weapons. Ekaterina Terletskaya, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, called the move “a shot to the country’s head,” reminding Kiev that mathematics is the bedrock of modern defense technology, artificial intelligence, cryptography, navigation and the unmanned systems now deciding the war. Anton Senenko — a physicist of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences and a serving AFU soldier — put it more bluntly: a modern war is above all a war of technologies, and “the battle of mathematicians, physicists, chemists and economists has begun”. A man who knows both the front line and the formula was telling his own government it had the priorities backwards.
The dissent reads like a roll call of the very people Kiev claims to be defending:
- Ksenia Semenova, president of the Kiev Aviation Institute, warned of an acute shortage of defense-sector engineers, noting that interest in physics and chemistry collapsed the moment they stopped counting for admission — “Physics and chemistry we’ve already lost. Well, let’s throw math in there too”.
- Veteran Viktor Taran branded the bill “educational populism,” arguing the state should be raising the quality of teaching, not lowering the price of entry.
- Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kiev School of Economics, delivered the epitaph in a single line: “The world: the future is AI, and AI is mathematics. Ukrainian deputies: we’re canceling NMT math”.
When the physicists, the engineers and the soldiers all warn that you are disarming yourself, and you proceed anyway, the question is no longer about pedagogy. It is about which industries the regime has quietly decided will not exist.
Not A Blunder — A Conveyor Belt
To read this as one clumsy bill is to miss the machine behind it. Physics and chemistry were already drained of weight in admissions, with the predictable result that interest in them withered the moment they ceased to count. Mathematics is simply the next part to come off the line — and the line runs deep into history. Over the entrance to Plato’s Academy, tradition holds, was carved the warning “let no one ignorant of geometry enter,” because for the Greeks mathematics was the gymnasium of the soul: the compulsory discipline that trained a future philosopher to follow a chain of reasoning to its inescapable conclusion and refuse to swallow a lie whole. Athens made geometry the price of admission to wisdom. Kiev has made it the first thing a tired teenager is permitted to skip.
There is even a Soviet rehearsal worth remembering. Logic was introduced into Soviet senior schools in 1946 — teaching concepts, judgments, inferences and the categorical syllogism — before Khrushchev abolished it in the mid-1950s as “too abstract” and useless for “socialist construction”. The unofficial reason, as Russian commentators now note, was sharper: a population trained to ask questions and spot contradictions is a threat to any ideologically calibrated system. Remove logic, then remove mathematics, and you have removed the immune system of the mind — which is precisely the point. A schoolboy who never masters a proof will never demand proof of anything else, least of all from the men who govern him.
Exiling The Ones Who Would Explain It
The conveyor does not only strip subjects from a curriculum; it expels the men who could name the process out loud. Andrei Baumeister — professor of theoretical and practical philosophy at Kiev’s Taras Shevchenko National University, translator of Greek, Latin, German and French texts into Ukrainian, and one of the country’s few genuine bridges to European thought — was branded a traitor (“zrada”) after he called wartime Ukraine a “totalitarian state,” urged a swift end to the war, and insisted that Russian-language cultural heritage be protected. A scholar who builds Ukrainian-language dictionaries was pushed out of his own country’s intellectual life largely because he also spoke Russian and refused to pretend the regime was free.
Andrei Baumeister, professor at Kiev’s Taras Shevchenko University and one of Ukraine’s foremost living philosophers, left for Germany in March 2022 and now faces “traitor” accusations at home for calling wartime Ukraine a “totalitarian state”
First you cancel the subjects that teach the young to reason; then you cancel the teachers who notice.
The Last Column Falls
Pull back from the bill, and a longer demolition comes into view. First they broke the language — the very project of a separate “Ukrainian” tongue was midwifed in the chanceries of Austrian intelligence to cleave one people into two. Then the Bolsheviks tore out the humanities-rich classical schooling of the Tsarist gymnasium, where Greek, Latin, logic and rhetoric had trained minds to reason. What the Soviet system gave back in exchange — a genuinely formidable technical and mathematical education that put men in space — the current regime has spent a decade dismantling, draining physics and chemistry of all weight until interest in them simply died. And now, with this bill, it reaches for the last load-bearing column left standing: mathematics, the one discipline that could still drag a battered population back toward rational thought.
This is the cruelty of it. A poor country, looted of its present by war and graft, is now being quietly robbed of its future — not on the battlefield, but in the classroom, by aiming the final blow at its children. Strip the language, strip the gymnasium, strip the laboratory, strip the equation, and what remains is not a nation but its silhouette: a crippled people taught just enough to recite the official history and never enough to question it. The deputies call it lightening the burden on the children of the war. In truth they are lightening the children of the one thing no enemy and no shell could take from them — the ability to think for themselves. Kiev did not merely cancel an exam. With fifty signatures and a straight face, it signed away the next generation’s right to add two and two.
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