Beneath the bombs and constant threat of attack, a committed teacher has kept her students focused on resilience.
The forecast for the first day of school in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was pleasant. 1 August 2026 would be warm with light winds and partly sunny skies.
But at around 10 p.m. on 31 July, mobile phones buzzed with alerts that cut the evening calm. Nataliya, a teacher in one of the city’s elementary schools, read the words carefully: school would be canceled in the morning.
Nataliya, who spoke with Transitions on condition that only her first name be used, recalled a rush of trepidation after reading the message, knowing how eagerly her students awaited class. She’d already prepared her Ukrainian-language lesson for the day. Yet with Russian bombs exploding, educators had no choice but to delay school.
“I want to teach them, I want to give them knowledge, but it doesn’t work,” said Nataliya. “Personally I don’t take this well in my soul, because I want the kids to have a childhood.”
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches its fifth anniversary, life for Ukrainians has become a series of tradeoffs. For the country’s 3.5 million school-age children, that means navigating an education disrupted by air raids, damaged classrooms, and displacement. And for one schoolteacher, educating students has meant adapting to the realities of war and finding ways to keep children learning even when they are scattered across the country, beyond its borders – or deep underground.
In Nataliya’s classroom, disruption comes in the form of upheaval and relocation. Her 22 students, aged six and seven, spend 22 hours a week studying math, the Ukrainian language, world history, art, and English. But only a handful come to school in person; the others join online. Seven of her students have moved to Germany, Turkey, and Spain. The rest are stuck at home.
Nataliya describes the artillery shelling during school hours laconically. It starts, there’s potentially a 10-minute break of silence before sirens blare, and then it repeats. This goes on for hours.
How much learning happens often comes down to how adept the students and their teacher are at determining whether a missile is ballistic and where it is likely to hit. Many of Russia’s missiles are aimed at Odesa or Kyiv, Nataliya said, but parents still call to assess the dangers.
The end of class brings little reprieve, and nights are spent on “prayers to God for it all to end,” Nataliya said. She often counts rockets as if they were sheep.
by a Russian missile strike, 25 April 2023. Nearly all the town’s prewar
population has fled. Press service of the National Police of
Ukraine in Kharkiv region / handout via Reuters
Leaving Home
Nataliya’s arrival in a Kharkiv classroom followed a familiar pattern for Ukrainians escaping Russia’s invasion, a story she shared over a series of WhatsApp messages and phone calls from mid-2025 to mid-2026.
Born and raised in Kupyansk, about 120 kilometers to the southeast of Kharkiv, Nataliya fled her hometown in April 2022. She had just two hours to pack up and leave.
When the Russians occupied her city in 2022, bridges were destroyed, and food and other necessities – bread, soap, shampoo – became difficult to find. Ukrainians began growing their own potatoes and carrots, Nataliya said, a hardship she compared to Soviet times.
Her parents didn’t want to leave Kupyansk. But as the Russian presence in the city grew, and at the insistence of her husband, a lieutenant colonel in Ukraine’s military, Nataliya convinced them it was time.
Even as Russian fighter planes rattled overhead, Ukraine still controlled a slice of Kupyansk, facilitating an evacuation to Dnipro. Along the way, Nataliya joined cars full of refugees – many carrying children from Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk – who were also fleeing Russian occupation.
Nataliya and her family moved to Kharkiv in 2023 after a Ukrainian counteroffensive retook parts of the region. She found a job teaching almost immediately.
For a while, her parents slept on a couch in the kitchen while she slept on a couch with her daughter in the living room. The family has since moved to a different apartment in the city where everyone has their own room.
“I couldn’t imagine their old age [being] like this,” she said of the hardships her parents, both 70, have had to endure. “We will leave if the shelling becomes more frequent. But there is nowhere in particular [to go], and no funds to [go] somewhere far away.”
This Is ‘How We Live’
On 11 June 2025, a Russian drone strike near Nataliya’s school killed at least three people and injured more than 60. “It was very scary, because the Shaheds were exploding near the house – 50, 100 meters from me,” she said, referring to Russia’s Iranian-designed drones. “Many families with children were affected … Children as young as 6 from my class are scared.”
She added: “That’s how we live. Sometimes it seems that we are simply being destroyed and the world does not see what is happening. Kharkiv is [all] nerves, anxiety, pain.”
More recently, Nataliya said the constant drone strikes and missile shelling prompted educators like her to bring their schools underground. Here, her students have access to a cafeteria, classrooms, and ventilation. They sit on benches against walls painted olive green and peach, balancing stuffed animals and notebooks on their laps.
Nataliya says these underground schools are becoming increasingly common. She said the newest addition opened on 1 September, with plentiful classrooms, study halls, a cafeteria, and even a gym. Together with other schools in the city, teachers are able to provide lessons to more than 2,000 students in a hybrid setting, where some classes are above ground and, when needed, can shift to the subterranean option.
“The day passes with difficulty, because between each shelling, there is very little time,” Nataliya said. “The parents of Kharkiv are so used to these [attacks] that they already understand the beginning of the shelling, the end of the shelling, and when to not worry.”
Nataliya said many of her pupils cry when they cannot attend school, and often beg their parents to let them go in person. The longer the war drags on, she said, the more intense this need becomes.
What’s most challenging for Nataliya is watching children suffer socially. Since they can only attend school in person twice a week and online the other days, this has affected their social skills. In spite of the challenges, she said she tries to mimic a normal classroom environment. “The kids are used to it, they like learning,” she said. “Even though there is danger, they happily want to go to school and learn in person.”
An Enduring Commitment
For Nataliya, distractions come in waves. She said she’s been on antidepressants since the spring, when the shelling was particularly bad in Kharkiv. During heavy strikes, she puts on headphones to block out the noise. The next time school is canceled, she said, she hopes it’s for something mundane – like the weather – and not for a steady barrage of Russian shells and missiles raining down during a school day.
But teaching may be her most important distraction. She’s devoted to her students’ education, she said. No war lasts forever, and one day, she hopes that her students will have their future back.
Ava Menkes is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has done politics internships at Wisconsin Watch, Isthmus, The Nation, and the Raleigh News & Observer. She is currently a senior reporter at the Key Biscayne Independent. Translation support from Nika Shumilov and Peter Fishman.
