More than 20,000 children from DPR, LPR come to Russia - Russian education minister

MOSCOW. March 4 (Interfax) - More than 20,000 children have come to Russia from the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, all of them are already in schools and kindergartens, Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said.

"All children who have come, there are more than 20,000 now, we know all of them; the majority of them went to schools and kindergartens on Monday," Kravtsov told reporters.

"There are no problems" with putting the children in kindergartens, he said. "As for schools, we see to it that there are two or three people in a class, to make it comfortable for the children to study," he said.

The minister said Russia is ready to "take everyone who will come to us, all children." "We are ready, our regions are ready. The most children are in Rostov [on-Don], Voronezh, Belgorod, the Volgograd and Moscow regions. The other regions are ready, and we don't see any problems here," Kravtsov said.

The minister said he does not see any problems with adaptation of the school students arriving in Russia to the Russian educational programs, either. "The programs are mainly the same, we have now analyzed, there's a 5-7% difference; there are no serious problems with joining the education process," he said.

Kravtsov also said he does not know of any situations of pressure on teachers over their position on the Ukraine situation. "We have 1.2 million teachers. Maybe there are some opinions, but their number is negligible," he said.