In a marble-lined former subway passage in eastern Ukraine, more than 10 meters underground, are newly installed classrooms so deep they could withstand a nuclear explosion.
Kharkiv’s underground school – adorned with colorful decorations, toys and pictures – is the safest place for pupils to be, boasts Iryna Tarasenko, the city’s education chief.
Classrooms are just one of the desperate measures Ukraine is taking to protect its children from war and mitigate the devastating impact of the conflict with Russia on a young generation marked by personal loss and educational disruptions.
“This generation of children has really lost a lot – and they have lost not only in terms of knowledge, but also in terms of development,” said Iryna Potapenko, an education researcher at STEM Osvita, a nonprofit group.
Young Ukrainians have suffered through at least two years of conflict; For those living in areas affected by Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula and subsequent conflict in the eastern Donbass region, the trauma goes back much further. With little sign of an end to the war, the impact on the nation’s children and adolescents is already severe enough to have long-lasting effects.
Ukrainian children have suffered the biggest ever decline in reading and literacy, Deputy Education Minister Andriy Stashkiv said. Stress and isolation increased, he said, as young people led lives of “airstrikes, shelters, distance learning, lack of communication with peers and little socialization due to the war.”
For most children, the closure of schools during the war denied them a normal school life, the chance to make friends and interact with teachers. Those who have fled abroad feel disconnected from friends and family; those still in Ukraine are often stuck with parents who keep them at home for fear of missile attacks. Children living in the occupied territories, having endured the violence of the invasion, live with the continuing fear of Russian repression.
Now, about half of Ukraine’s 4.1 million school-age children attend classes in person, according to the Ministry of Education. Nearly 1 million are enrolled remotely from abroad or from safer parts of the country; another million take in-person lessons combined with virtual lessons.
Thousands of children stranded on the other side of the 1,000km-long front line are also secretly tuning into Ukraine’s online lessons, according to teachers interviewed by the Financial Times. Kiev’s Education Ministry says just over 67,000 children in Russian-occupied territories are virtually enrolled in Ukrainian schools.
Among the hardest hit are 10- and 11-year-olds from frontline areas who attended in-person schools for only a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Right at the end of the lockdown, on February 24, 2022, Russian tanks started arriving.
The northeastern city of Kharkiv has been hit by constant bombing since Russia launched its full-scale invasion; the barrages have intensified in recent months. From February to May 2022, Russian forces besieged the city but failed to capture it. A successful Ukrainian counteroffensive later that year pushed the enemy back, but with the Russian border just 30km away, missiles, rockets and drones can strike within minutes of launch, bypassing Kharkiv’s air defense systems and hitting civilian targets.
Downstairs, in the city’s metropolitan school, morning lessons are entirely dedicated to pupils in the first year of education, which in Ukraine begins at the age of six.
Under artificial light, children begin each school day by observing the 9 a.m. national minute of silence for Ukraine’s war dead, followed by the national anthem and some light stretching exercises, teacher Anastasia Provotorova said .
“We don’t give importance to what is happening and we try not to tell the children about it. When they start talking to each other about the war, we try to tone it down,” Provotorova said.
Six-year-old Olivia, who lived in Kharkiv during the war, said she loved grammar. “I want to be a writer,” she said to the volunteer in English before returning to play with her friends during the break.
At the back of the room sat child psychologist Inna Homych, who said the children were often anxious and struggled to concentrate.
“They absorb the anxiety of all the adults around them. The fact that their parents wake them up and take them out into the hallway [to shelter when sirens go off], even coming to this metropolitan school, everything affects their emotional state,” Homych said. “Wetting the bed and having bad dreams has become frequent.”
The city’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, initiated the project to create its five “metropolitan schools.” In one of the city’s most populated suburbs, Terekhov is now overseeing the construction of a much larger underground school that can accommodate 1,600 pupils over two daily shifts.
The project is estimated to cost just under $1.5 million, the mayor said, initially from the city budget, but the regional administration plans to subsidize more. Other cities near the front have reached out to replicate the idea, he said.
However, even once built, the underground school will only cover a fraction of the 57,000 children who currently live in Kharkiv and are enrolled in its schools. Thousands more children have arrived in Kharkiv from other parts of the country and are participating in online lessons organized by their old schools.
Olha Kozachenko, headteacher of a school in the occupied village of Ivaniivskyi, near Bakhmut, which was lost to Russian forces last year, said that of the 120 pupils who attended her school before the war, 116 were still attending remotely from across the country. Ukraine and from abroad. She fled to the east-central Poltava region of Ukraine, but she is proud that all of her teachers continue to provide online lessons.
“It’s because we’re good together. We start every teacher meeting with [saying] how we love each other and the same thing with children,” Kozachenko said.
Since the invasion, he said, children have almost never missed classes and continue to participate in national competitions.
Another principal, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions, fled occupied southern Ukraine after being arrested four times. On one occasion, he said he was put in the trunk of a car and beaten after he refused to head the new Russian-run school. He said virtual learning is a lifeline for a quarter of the remaining pupils in his occupied city.
After the Russian-run school ended, he said, some students in the occupied areas – mostly teenagers – secretly looked at Ukrainian school records online and turned in their homework. The hope was that when their town was liberated, they would not miss school and could proceed to university, the principal said.
But as Ukraine heads into its third year of large-scale conflict, its public finances are suffering. The principal said he fears that virtual schools could be disbanded and that their teachers could be fired due to lack of funding. Currently, Kiev still pays teachers who refused to enroll in Russian-run schools.
Stopping that lifeline would be “like abandoning them. They did the right thing and now we turn our backs on them?” He said.
Authorities in Kiev said education, online learning and budgets for teacher salaries, including those in occupied areas, remain their second priority after defense. But it was preferred to replace virtual schools with real ones.
“All indicators show that distance learning has a negative effect. . . reading proficiency is the most affected,” said Stashkiv, the deputy schools minister. “That’s why we are trying to get children who live in areas where schools are open to attend school.”