Russian teacher slaps two second graders, grabs another by the neck in Vietnamese classroom

A Russian teacher slapped two second graders and grabbed another by the neck, lifting the child out of class, during an English lesson at a private school in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho.

The incident, captured by a security camera, took place at around 4 p.m. on Sept. 22 at Viet-Hoa School in Cai Rang Ward.

The footage shows two men in the classroom with the students. One walks down between the desks and slaps two sitting in the front row in the face.

He then pulls a third student by the arm, grabs the child by the neck and lifts them off the floor to take them out of the room. When he comes back, he slaps one of the first two students again.

Tran Tan Buu, the school's principal, said on Oct. 28 that the man in the footage was a 35-year-old English teacher of Russian nationality and the other man a Vietnamese teaching assistant. Neither was on the school's staff; both came from an outside center that teaches the school's enhanced English program under a partnership contract, Buu said.

A teacher grabs a student by the neck at the classroom in Can Tho on Sept. 22, 2026. Photo from security camera footage

The class had 36 students at the time, split into two groups to practice speaking with the foreign teacher. Buu said the teacher had seemed cheerful before the incident, and the students had been interacting with him freely.

But in roughly the last eight minutes of the lesson, the teacher suddenly turned violent, and the assistant could not react in time. Because the camera records images but no sound, the school has yet to determine exactly what caused it.

The school's management has apologized to the students and their parents and reported the incident to police so they could investigate and deal with it. The English center has terminated the teacher's contract.

Viet-Hoa is a private school that has operated for more than 20 years. It has 36 classes with more than 1,000 students, from kindergarten through 12th grade.