Kharkiv, Ukraine – Maksym Trystapshon takes the subway to work. However the faculty head trainer and English trainer from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis that sits solely 40km (25 miles) from the Russian border, doesn’t want to depart the subway station to see his college students.
His faculty is true contained in the Oleksandr Maselsky station on Kharkiv’s southeastern outskirts, a stone’s throw away from roaring trains and hurrying commuters.
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It was once a draughty hallway on the best way out of the station that closed down three a long time in the past. Now, it’s a small “metroschool” with flimsy white plastic doorways that permit out and in virtually 2,000 schoolchildren and preschoolers who examine in 4 cramped lecture rooms in shifts seven days every week.
“You don’t have to consider the struggle, it’s a protected place, and also you solely take into consideration educating youngsters, not the issues that encompass us,” Trystapshon, bespectacled and burly, informed Al Jazeera minutes earlier than three dozen third-graders stormed into his classroom.
“Security” is the mantra even the youngest college students repeat right here.
“I like finding out right here, like assembly mates, as a result of it’s protected,” Alisa, 9, informed Al Jazeera.
Since 2022, greater than 100 youngsters – and about 3,000 civilian adults – have been killed by Russian artillery, multiple-launch rocket techniques, drones and missiles within the Kharkiv area.
In current days, a Russian missile struck one more condominium constructing, killing a nine-year-old boy and a 13-year-old lady – together with 9 adults.
Air raid sirens howl in Kharkiv a number of instances a day, and lately, a brand new hazard emerged – Russian drones with kilometres-long optic fibre that makes them resistant to digital jamming.
Kharkiv’s subway system of 30 stations that served the town with a pre-war inhabitants of 1.4 million turned out to be the most secure and most accessible place for colleges.
Eight function already, together with 10 colleges in basements and bunkers within the Kharkiv area serving some 20,000 college students, whereas all common colleges have been closed.
Below the pale mild of luminescent bulbs, youngsters examine, talk and play with friends as an alternative of “attending” lessons on-line of their residences or homes that might be hit by drones or missiles at any second.
White plastic containers with their lunches are delivered every day – together with cauldrons of uzvar, a vitamin-rich beverage of simmered dried fruit and berries.
“That is safer than sitting in entrance of a display screen at house alone,” Oksana Barabash, a 39-year-old homemaker, informed Al Jazeera after dropping off her son Nazar, a first-grader who had by no means attended kindergarten due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the struggle. “I by no means had a single doubt about enrolling him right here.”
Not all dad and mom had been that courageous initially.
“It was laborious to persuade dad and mom,” metropolis schooling division spokeswoman Daria Kariuk-Vinohradova informed Al Jazeera.
The varsity’s security proved irresistible – today, “there’s a ready record of fogeys eager to enrol their youngsters right here”, she mentioned.
A bus collects the kids who dwell within the district above the varsity.
Named Industrialny (Industrial), the world in Kharkiv’s southeast is comparatively protected compared with northern districts which can be nearer to the Russian border.
Nevertheless it can’t escape assaults.
‘Youngsters don’t wait at bus stops’
In August 2025, a drone flew into an condominium constructing within the district, killing an 18-month-old lady and a 16-year-old boy together with 5 adults.
That’s the reason “youngsters don’t wait at bus stops” that may be hit by drones or missiles, Kariuk-Vinohradova mentioned.
From day one in every of its full-scale invasion, Russia struck civilian buildings, together with hospitals, maternity wards, kindergartens and colleges.
“They needed to depart us with out our previous, historical past, tradition, information,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Fb on September 1, 2022, the primary day of time period in Ukraine, subsequent to images of ruined colleges.
In June 2022, fewer than 4 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion started, a 16-year-old faculty graduate named Valeriya got here to the ruins of her Kharkiv faculty carrying a purple, fluffy ball robe meant for her promenade night time, and her classmates danced a waltz on the varsity’s basketball courtroom.
In occupied areas, colleges grew to become focus camps.
In early 2022, the complete inhabitants of the northern village of Yahidne – 368 individuals, together with six dozen youngsters – was herded to the varsity’s basement for 27 days with subsequent to no meals or water.
Seventeen villagers died there; their our bodies remained subsequent to the residing for days till the invaders allow them to be eliminated and buried.
By early 2026, greater than 4,000 colleges, kindergartens and universities have been broken or destroyed all through Ukraine, officers mentioned.
Amongst them are greater than two-thirds of Kharkiv’s colleges – 134 out of 184, the town’s high schooling official, Olha Demenko, mentioned in January.
“Some should be rebuilt from scratch,” she mentioned.
Their curriculum features a new self-discipline titled “Defence of Ukraine” that features classes in first support and survival abilities.
The youngsters’s socialisation has one other side.
Regardless of being the cradle of Ukrainian nationalism and literature and Soviet Ukraine’s first capital between 1919 and 1934, by the Seventies, Kharkiv had virtually solely switched to Russian.
The language continues to be ubiquitous right here and is commonly heard in retailers, banks and hospitals regardless of the 2019 regulation that restricts its use within the “public sphere”.
Colleges typically show to be the one place the place youngsters can examine and practise Ukrainian.
“I’m an old-timer, I maintain talking Russian, however my grandchildren want to talk Ukrainian,” Anna Mikhalchuk, a 67-year-old retired manufacturing facility employee, informed Al Jazeera, as she waited for her granddaughter sitting on a bench contained in the subway station.
