When Olena Kozachenko chose a school for her son in Kyiv, she had two requirements: it had to be close to home, and it had to have a good bomb shelter. Not academic rankings or extracurricular activities. A bomb shelter.
Yaromyr, eight, has only ever attended school during Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. His Kyiv school was the one his mother and grandmother had attended. Some teachers still recognized Olena. Yet his school days would look nothing like his mother’s during the years of peace. Even his first teacher had been displaced by war, leaving Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region to teach in the capital city.
For two years, Olena says, things were relatively manageable. Power cuts disrupted routines, but generators arrived, and school meals resumed. Then, in September, constant air raid alerts made moving children repeatedly between classrooms and shelter impractical. The youngest pupils began spending entire school days underground.
“There were about 70 children in one space,” Olena recalls. “It was incredibly noisy. They didn’t go outside. They didn’t see the sun. They were in the shelter constantly.” They learned, drew, and ate at the same desks.
One afternoon, Yaromyr came home very sad. His Ukrainian-language dictation was full of errors and missing words, unusual for a boy who normally wrote well. “I asked him what had happened, and he started crying,” Olena says. “He told me: ‘Mom, it was so loud in the shelter that I couldn’t hear more than half of what the teacher dictated. I was sitting at the back. I couldn’t write it down.’” According to Olena, he was also reprimanded for the mistakes.
Across Ukraine, Russian attacks, displacement and electricity shortages have repeatedly disrupted education. Schools have adapted with shelters, generators, and online classes. But Yaromyr’s dictation exposes the gap between keeping lessons running and enabling children to learn. A child can be present, with a teacher right in front of him, and still be unable to hear.
Olena watched her son grow increasingly unhappy.
“He didn’t want to go to school anymore,” she says. “He knew he would spend the whole day in a basement, without sunlight or active games. Even lunch was down there.”
Not that home life offered any respite. The family spent nights in Kyiv’s metro stations. When ballistic attacks left too little time to reach one, they sheltered in their apartment hallway. Yaromyr began waking every night, even without attacks.
His father is a Ukrainian serviceman who first volunteered to join the army in 2014, and returned to war in 2022 when Yaromyr was four. Now the boy is nearly nine. “His father is upset that he doesn’t see his child growing up,” Olena says. “And Yaromyr is upset that he has barely seen his dad properly for almost five years.”
During his father’s leave this September, the family travelled abroad. “Yaromyr said: ‘God, it’s so nice here. You don’t have to sleep in the metro. Nobody is shooting. You can go for walks whenever you want.’” He was amazed by the ordinary freedoms of childhood.
Olena returned to Kyiv hoping conditions would improve. Instead, she reached a decision she had once considered unthinkable. “I always said I would stay home until the last moment, until a Russian soldier entered Kyiv. But one morning I woke up and realized my child simply couldn’t cope with it anymore.”
They moved to Rivne, west of Kyiv. Olena again chose a school for its shelter and proximity to home. She hoped for ordinary lessons. Within weeks, however, drone attacks prompted a switch to online learning. Classes now started at 11 a.m. and involve at least four hours in front of a screen. Because Yaromyr has developed eyesight problems, Olena lends him her work laptop and works from her phone. “I can see he has fallen behind,” she says. “I hired tutors for mathematics and English. His knowledge isn’t where it should be.”
But the losses cannot all be repaired through tutoring. In Kyiv, Yaromyr loved visiting Hydropark across the Dnipro. As attacks made travelling across the city feel too dangerous, Olena stopped taking him there. “He kept asking when we could go,” she recalls. “He understood why we couldn’t. But he’s a child. Understanding danger doesn’t mean he stops wanting to go to his favorite place.”
Remarkably, he has embraced Rivne. After his first day at school, he announced he had made a friend, Maksym. He likes his new teacher and is already planning to invite new friends to his February birthday. “He adapted more easily than I did,” Olena says. “But I think it was less traumatic for him only because home had become worse than anywhere people simply weren’t shooting.”
There is something devastating about displacement feeling like relief.
Ukraine’s teachers and parents are doing extraordinary work to keep education alive. Yet education is more than a timetable, completed exercises, or a functioning internet connection. It is sunlight, friendship, play, and the chance to make mistakes without war drowning out the teacher’s voice.
Asked what she wants most, Olena does not mention better technology or more tutoring.
“I want the attacks on my city to stop,” she says. “I want to go home. I want us to return to normal life.”
Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary, Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
