Kharkiv, Ukraine – Maksym Trystapshon goes to work by subway. But the school principal and English teacher in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, located just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Russian border, doesn’t need to leave the subway station to see his students.
Their school is just inside the Oleksandr Maselsky station on the southeastern outskirts of Kharkiv, a stone’s throw from the roar of trains and hurrying commuters.
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It used to be a drafty hallway at the exit of the station which closed three decades ago. Now it is a small “metroschool” with flimsy white plastic doors through which almost 2,000 schoolchildren and preschoolers enter and leave, studying in four narrow classrooms in shifts seven days a week.
“You don’t have to think about the war, it’s a safe place and you only think about teaching the children, not about the problems around us,” Trystapshon, burly and bespectacled, told Al Jazeera minutes before three dozen third-graders burst into his classroom.
“Safety” is the mantra that even the youngest students repeat here.
“I like studying here, meeting friends, because it’s safe,” nine-year-old Alisa told Al Jazeera.
Since 2022, more than 100 children – and some 3,000 civilian adults – have been killed by Russian artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, drones and missiles in the Kharkiv region.
In recent days, a Russian missile hit another apartment building, killing a nine-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, along with nine adults.
Air raid sirens sound in Kharkiv several times a day and a new danger has recently emerged: Russian drones with kilometer-long fiber optics that make them immune to electronic interference.
Kharkiv’s 30-station metro system that served the city with a population of 1.4 million before the war turned out to be the safest and most accessible location for schools.
Eight are already operating, along with 10 schools in basements and bunkers in the Kharkiv region serving some 20,000 students, while all regular schools have been closed.
Under the pale light of luminescent bulbs, children study, communicate and play with their peers instead of “attending” online classes in their apartments or houses that could be hit by drones or missiles at any moment.
White plastic boxes containing their lunches are delivered daily, along with cauldrons of uzvar, a vitamin-rich drink made from slow-cooked nuts and berries.
“This is safer than sitting alone in front of a screen at home,” Oksana Barabash, a 39-year-old housewife, told Al Jazeera after dropping off her son Nazar, a first-grader who had never attended kindergarten due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war. “I never had the slightest doubt about signing him up here.”
Not all parents were so brave at first.
“It was difficult to convince the parents,” city education department spokesperson Daria Kariuk-Vinohradova told Al Jazeera.
The security of the school proved irresistible: today “there is a waiting list of parents who want to enroll their children here,” he said.
A bus picks up children who live in the neighborhood above the school.
Called Industrialny (Industrial), the area southeast of Kharkiv is relatively safe compared to the northern districts that are closer to the Russian border.
But he can’t escape the attacks.
“Children don’t wait at bus stops”
In August 2025, a drone entered an apartment building in the district and killed an 18-month-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, and five adults.
That’s why “children don’t wait at bus stops” that can be hit by drones or missiles, Kariuk-Vinohradova said.
From the first day of its full-scale invasion, Russia attacked civilian buildings, including hospitals, maternity wards, daycare centers, and schools.
“They wanted to leave us without our past, our history, our culture and our knowledge,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook on September 1, 2022, the first day of his mandate in Ukraine, alongside photographs of dilapidated schools.
In June 2022, less than four months after the full-scale Russian invasion began, a 16-year-old graduate named Valeriya arrived at the ruins of her Kharkiv school dressed in a fluffy red dress intended for her graduation night, and her classmates danced a waltz on the school’s basketball court.
In occupied areas, schools became concentration camps.
In early 2022, the entire population of the northern village of Yahidne – 368 people, including six dozen children – was herded into the school basement for 27 days with barely any food or water.
Seventeen villagers died there; Their bodies remained with the living for days until the invaders allowed them to be removed and buried.
As of early 2026, more than 4,000 schools, kindergartens and universities have been damaged or destroyed across Ukraine, officials said.
Among them are more than two-thirds of Kharkiv’s schools: 134 out of 184, the city’s top education official, Olha Demenko, said in January.
“Some will have to be rebuilt from scratch,” he said.
Its curriculum includes a new discipline titled “Defense of Ukraine” that includes lessons in first aid and survival skills.
The socialization of children has another aspect.
Despite being the cradle of Ukrainian nationalism and literature and the first capital of Soviet Ukraine between 1919 and 1934, by the 1970s Kharkiv had become almost exclusively Russian.
The language remains ubiquitous here and is often heard in shops, banks and hospitals despite a 2019 law restricting its use in the “public sphere.”
Schools are often the only place where children can study and practice Ukrainian.
“I’m a veteran, I still speak Russian, but my grandchildren need to speak Ukrainian,” Anna Mikhalchuk, a 67-year-old retired factory worker, told Al Jazeera as she sat on a bench inside the metro station waiting for her granddaughter.
