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 a draughty hallway on the best way out of the station that closed down three many years in the past. Now, it’s a small “metroschool” with flimsy white plastic doorways that allow out and in nearly 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 battle, it’s a secure 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 secure,” 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 methods, drones and missiles within the Kharkiv area.
In latest days, a Russian missile struck one more house 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 just 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 gentle of luminescent bulbs, youngsters examine, talk and play with friends as an alternative of “attending” courses on-line of their residences or homes that could possibly be hit by drones or missiles at any second.
White plastic bins 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 at dwelling 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 battle. “I by no means had a single doubt about enrolling him right here.”
Not all mother and father have been that courageous initially.
“It was exhausting to persuade mother and father,” metropolis training division spokeswoman Daria Kariuk-Vinohradova informed Al Jazeera.
The varsity’s security proved irresistible – lately, “there’s a ready record of fogeys desirous to enrol their children right here”, she stated.
A bus collects the kids who reside within the district above the college.
Named Industrialny (Industrial), the realm in Kharkiv’s southeast is comparatively secure as compared with northern districts which are nearer to the Russian border.
However it can not escape assaults.
‘Youngsters don’t wait at bus stops’
In August 2025, a drone flew into an house constructing within the district, killing an 18-month-old lady and a 16-year-old boy together with 5 adults.
That’s the reason “children don’t wait at bus stops” that may be hit by drones or missiles, Kariuk-Vinohradova stated.
From day one in all its full-scale invasion, Russia struck civilian buildings, together with hospitals, maternity wards, kindergartens and colleges.
“They wished 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 sporting a crimson, fluffy ball robe supposed for her promenade night time, and her classmates danced a waltz on the college’s basketball courtroom.
In occupied areas, colleges turned focus camps.
In early 2022, the whole inhabitants of the northern village of Yahidne – 368 folks, together with six dozen youngsters – was herded to the college’s basement for 27 days with subsequent to no meals or water.
Seventeen villagers died there; their our bodies remained subsequent to the dwelling 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 stated.
Amongst them are greater than two-thirds of Kharkiv’s colleges – 134 out of 184, the town’s prime training official, Olha Demenko, stated in January.
“Some should be rebuilt from scratch,” she stated.
Their curriculum features a new self-discipline titled “Defence of Ukraine” that features classes in first help and survival expertise.
The kids’s socialisation has one other facet.
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 nearly solely switched to Russian.
The language continues to be ubiquitous right here and is usually heard in retailers, banks and hospitals regardless of the 2019 legislation that restricts its use within the “public sphere”.
Colleges usually 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.
