On 04/10/2014, a few dozen people picketed the Ukrainian gymnasium, claiming to be parents of the students and representatives of the so-called "self-defense". Later on, Ilya Glazkov, the self-proclaimed vice mayor of Simferopol, and Tatiana Sukhina, so-called "head of the education department of the Executive Committee of Simferopol", would pay a visit to the head teacher of the gymnasium. They would threaten to have Natalia Rudenko fired with a cause unless she signed a letter of resignation by mutual consent.

Just a day before, Natalia Goncharova, the illegitimate minister of education of the Republic of Crimea, said on a talk show on one of the Crimean TV channels that the so-called "ministry" reached an "internal agreement" to convert the Ukrainian gymnasium into a Russian-language school. The head teacher stood for preservation of the status of the gymnasium, but, under duress, she had to write a letter of resignation.

In April 2014, the parents' committee of the gymnasium turned to the leadership of the self-proclaimed Republic of Crimea, demanding that the order terminating the employment of the head teacher be revoked. In their opinion, such a decision posed a threat to the existence of the educational institution in its current status and to the composition of its teaching staff, violating the children’s right to get education in the Ukrainian language. The parents pointed out that even the so-called "Constitution of the Republic of Crimea" proclaimed Ukrainian to be one of state languages. The protest was to no avail.

In May 2014, Tatiana Sukhina announced that 3/4 of the classes in the gymnasium would be taught in the Russian language. Within few months, the educational facility called the Ukrainian Gymnasium School would lose its Ukrainian-language status and was illegally converted into the so-called "Simferopol Academic Gymnasium".

By the beginning of the new academic year, in September 2014, there was not a single Ukrainian-language first class there. Subsequently, cadet classes appeared in the gymnasium which would prepare the Crimean youth for the service in the occupation army. The chairman of the illegitimate "State Council of the Republic of Crimea" Vladimir Konstantinov. joined the board of trustees of the gymnasium.

Formally, according to the statements of the occupation administration, one school in Crimea will, allegedly, retain its Ukrainian-language status. However, according to the Russian law, students in final years of secondary school are to be taught exclusively in the Russian language. According to the monitoring data collected by human rights activists, the Ukrainian language is practically excluded from the teaching and nurturing process in other classes as well.

According to Eskender Bariev, member of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, more than half of the schools in Crimea that used to have a Crimean Tatar-speaking status before the Russian occupation were turned into Russian-speaking or bilingual. Senior high school students will be taught in Russian even in the institutions that formally have preserved their former language status. The number of hours for studying the Crimean Tatar language was reduced as well. The occupants would thwart any attempt to introduce the Latin script of the Crimean Tatar language into the educational process.

On 01/16/2017, Ukraine filed a lawsuit with the UN International Court of Justice in the Hague against the Russian Federation for violation of the Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which, among other things, will address the matter of restrictions imposed on the teaching in the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages. On 04/19/2017, the court made a ruling in this case, particularly obliging Russia to make arrangements for education in the Ukrainian language. The occupying state ignored this ruling and continued the violation of international law.

In its special statement, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine qualified the forced resignation of Natalia Rudenko, head teacher of the Ukrainian gymnasium, as an unprecedented event and an act of repression perpetrated by the occupation structures and the self-proclaimed authorities of the Crimean Peninsula, and as a manifestation of the persecution of Ukrainian schools and teachers. Following the forced resignation, Natalia Rudenko moved to Kyiv where she carried on with her beloved pedagogical work.