The Tension Formula: Why the number of gun attacks in schools has increased
The tragedy in Dobryanka in the Perm Region, according to Izvestia's calculations, has already become the 16th incident involving weapons in Russian schools and other educational institutions since the beginning of the school year. Of these, ten occurred as early as 2026. These attacks mostly cannot be called a pre—planned attack aimed at harming a large number of random people - more often they are impulsive attacks committed by students against specific people: classmates or teachers. Izvestia learned the reason for the sharp increase in aggression in schools.
Attack on a teacher in the Perm region
In Dobryanka school No. 5, on the morning of April 7, a 17-year—old student fatally wounded a teacher, presumably because she refused to allow him to take the Russian language exam. A second—year teenager who often skipped classes and did poorly in school. He purposefully attacked the deceased Olesya Baguta, his homeroom teacher.
A criminal case has been opened into the incident, and under two articles at once.: "Murder" and "Negligence".
This tragedy fits into a series of attacks committed on schools and other educational institutions by teenagers in the 2025-2026 academic year. Moreover, the vast majority of them occurred after the New Year.
Incidents of attacks on schools in the 2025-2026 academic year
On September 17 last year, a teenager brought knives, a hammer and pepper spray to a school in the Ostrogozhsky district of the Voronezh Region. They managed to detain him before he harmed anyone.
On September 29, an 18-year-old expelled student attacked teachers and students of the Arkhangelsk College of Construction and Economics with a knife. Four people were injured. The criminal was sentenced to 13 years in prison under a terrorist article.
On December 15, a ninth-grader attacked a math teacher at school No. 191 in St. Petersburg with a knife, the woman was injured.
On December 16, a 15-year-old student of the Uspenskaya Secondary School in Odintsovo district killed a 10-year-old 4th grade student and injured several others.
On December 27, a 17-year-old first-year college student in the Republic of Tyva attended a New Year's event at a school in the village of Kyzyl-Mazhalyk, where he had previously studied, and killed a former classmate. He was sentenced to six years in a penal colony.
On January 22, 2026, a seventh-grader staged a stabbing at a school in Nizhnekamsk, Republic of Tatarstan. Two people were injured.
On February 3, a ninth-grader at Gymnasium No. 16 in Ufa opened fire with an airsoft machine gun at a history teacher and classmates. The teacher suffered minor injuries.
On the same day, a seventh-grader at school No. 4 in Kodinsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, tried to attack a teacher with a knife and injured a peer.
On February 4, a 14-year-old student at school No. 153 in Krasnoyarsk brought gasoline and a hammer into the educational institution, set one student on fire, and struck two more with a hammer. There were no fatalities, three people were hospitalized with burns.
On February 7, a 15-year-old teenager attacked foreign students in a dormitory at a medical university in Ufa, and several people were stabbed.
On February 10, a teenager with an air pistol, a knife and an axe was detained at a Sovetsky school in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. He was about to commit crimes against several students.
February 11 — A 17-year-old student attacked Anapa Industrial College with a hunting rifle, killed a guard and injured two people — a student and an employee.
On February 19, a 13-year-old student at school No. 1 in Alexandrovsk (Perm Region) attacked a classmate with a knife.
On March 16, in the village of Sverdlovsky near Moscow, a seventh-grader stabbed a peer with a knife, after which he went to class.
On March 26, a ninth-grader from school No. 32 in Chelyabinsk fired a signal pistol at a classmate and jumped out of a second-floor window. There are no fatalities, three criminal cases have been initiated.
And on April 7, a 17-year-old ninth-grader at school No. 5 in Dobryanka killed a teacher of Russian language and literature.
Thus, during the incomplete school year, there have already been more than 15 incidents with weapons in schools. At the same time, the Interior Ministry said in February that since the beginning of the year, law enforcement agencies in 15 regions of Russia had prevented 21 attacks on students and teachers.
Last academic year, there were about ten confirmed incidents in Russian schools.
Does the atmosphere at school affect the incidents?
Recently, there have been more conflicts in schools as a whole, says Dmitry Kazakov, chairman of the Teacher trade union.
—And if there are more of them, it means that statistically sooner or later there will be more serious consequences for such conflicts, as happened in Dobryanka," he believes.
At the same time, Mikhail Avdeenko, deputy co-chairman of the Council for the Protection of Professional Honor and Dignity of Teaching Staff at the Ministry of Education, Deputy Chairman of the All-Russian Trade Union of Education, calls for cases of such "egregious" crimes to be separated from the problem of conflict in the school environment as a whole.
"This teenager was registered for juvenile affairs, so you need to ask questions about how the work was done with him, how professional it was on the part of the school, the internal affairs bodies, and the juvenile affairs commission,— the Izvestia interlocutor draws attention. — We can only record that, unfortunately, the prevention system with such severe adolescents does not always work.
Anna Ermolaeva, Deputy head of the Federal Coordination Center for the Development of Psychological and Pedagogical Assistance in the MSPPU education System, also reports that the level of psycho-emotional stress in schools has increased. She attributes this to a number of factors that have been accumulating over the past few years.
— The post-pandemic syndrome and the subsequent difficult period in our country led to an increase in anxiety and a decrease in stress tolerance not only in children, but also in adults. In addition, the digital environment has changed the threshold of sensitivity to frustration: teenagers get used to instant reactions and lose the skills of patience and constructive dialogue, the expert explains.
At the same time, she urges not to discount the media effect of this story: each attack gets a wide response, creating a sense of epidemic among the audience, although statistically we can talk about "a small but steady increase in incidents of an impulsive nature."
Anna Makarchuk, psychologist, director of the Tolerance Center at the Jewish Museum, and expert of the federal anti-bullying project "Everyone is Important," agrees that such cases are the result of the growing tension and chronic stress in which the whole world has been living since the pandemic. In these circumstances, the support measures implemented do not correspond to the scale of the existing threat, says Irina Abankina, professor at the HSE Institute of Education.
At the same time, according to Makarchuk, it is important not to consider each case as a "point on the graph": It's always a unique story of a particular child that led to trouble.
How to change the situation
To prevent such incidents, it is important to review the algorithms of the teacher's actions in a conflict situation, notes Anna Ermolaeva.
— Teachers often fail to recognize the harbingers of aggression: a sharp change in affect, devaluing statements about others, and demonstrations of cruelty in narratives. It is necessary to train the teaching staff not in pedagogical, but in psychological de-escalation techniques. Simply put, a teacher should be able to safely get out of contact, reduce the heat verbally and not provoke a retaliatory outburst, and not engage in a struggle for authority, — says the interlocutor of Izvestia.
The long—term solution lies in the development of emotional regulation and empathy, as well as debugging a system for early detection of crisis states in adolescents, she believes. Measures aimed at reducing tension, rather than freezing it, will be effective.
— For example, rehabilitation mediation programs, when a conflict is handled with the participation of a neutral mediator. Regular trainings on team building and conflict-free communication have proven themselves well, which are conducted not "for show", but systematically. On the contrary, measures of purely administrative control, strengthening repressive discipline without psychological support can have the opposite effect," the expert clarifies.
If every step of the teacher is regulated, and the teenager feels like an object of supervision, the accumulated tension, according to Ermolaeva, seeks a way out in unexpected and destructive forms, one of which is an impulsive attack.
It is very important that every child in the classroom receives not formal, but "real human" attention, emphasizes Anna Makarchuk.
Today, teachers have an acute shortage of knowledge and skills in responding to alarms in the classroom, she notes. According to the psychologist, the expert resource of non-profit organizations is clearly underestimated here: they have methods, experience and trained specialists, but there is no system mechanism that would connect this expertise with schools.
— But we cannot require teachers to notice someone else's crisis if they themselves are in crisis. A person in chronic stress, after a full day of work, checking notebooks, reporting, is physically unable to be a sensitive radar for thirty children," admits the interlocutor of Izvestia.
Dmitry Kazakov is also confident that initiatives to increase punishment for students will only lead to an escalation of conflicts in schools. In his opinion, it is much more important to ensure peace of mind for educational institutions.
— Now the school is going through very difficult times in terms of both the quality of education and upbringing. A huge shortage of staff leads to an overload of teachers: there is no time even to talk to a student, to find out what problems he has, the expert is convinced. — Students who show aggression are most likely to have problems in their family, and the school should help solve them, not increase them. Creating normal conditions for teachers can help reduce this tension.
In turn, Irina Abankina believes that it is necessary to reduce the burden not only on teachers, but also on students. The general atmosphere of tension is combined with internal pressure, she explains. That is why they have recently started talking about reducing homework, the possibility of retaking exams, simplifying college admission, etc.
In addition, it is necessary to restore the connection between parents and schools: many adults do not devote enough time to their children, says Boris Ilyukhin, senior researcher at the Center for Economics of Continuing Education at the Presidential Academy. And Mikhail Avdeenko is sure that it is necessary to strengthen the legal protection of the teacher and at the same time tighten the responsibility of parents and teenagers themselves.
— According to the Family Code, raising a child is not the right, but the duty of a parent. This means that parents should bear the appropriate responsibility. Here it is necessary to think over additional measures that could be applied to parents," the expert points out.
Izvestia sent a request to the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. No response had been received at the time of publication.
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