PECHENIHY, Ukraine—Pechenihy is a village of bombed-out houses and drab, Soviet-era mid-rise flats amid pine forests and fields of black, fertile soil. Originally of the conflict, Russian forces occupied the settlements throughout the river from Pechenihy. Half of the village’s inhabitants fled; those that remained lived below fixed shelling for over six months.
Pechenihy resident Oksana Drozdova and her two younger sons left their residence behind in March 2022 for Schmallenberg, a city in western Germany. Drozdova was decided that her kids would keep their ties to Ukraine, and put her older son, then 10 years previous, via a grueling academic routine: German college from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., then hours of Ukrainian language and historical past assignments within the evenings.
Drozdova’s sons requested once they might go residence almost day by day. Quickly, Drozdova discovered herself questioning the identical factor. “If we postponed our return, it could be tougher to combine our youngsters to [Ukrainian] society,” she instructed International Coverage.
Because the Russian invasion of Ukraine drags into its fifth 12 months, Ukraine’s subsequent era is scattered the world over. Years of conflict have crippled Ukraine’s academic system, resulting in widespread studying loss and under-socialization for the 3.5 million students who stay in Ukraine. In the meantime, the roughly 1.6 million Ukrainian schoolchildren who dwell in Russian-occupied areas of the nation and the almost 1 million students within the European Union are quick dropping their connection to their residence nation.
Ukrainian refugees arrive by practice in Berlin on March 6, 2022. Carsten Koall/Getty Pictures
Mother and father like Drozdova are grappling with unattainable questions ship their kids to overseas colleges or take their probabilities with the Ukrainian system?
By the summer season of 2023, issues had been trying up, Drozdova thought. Ukraine was launching a long-awaited counteroffensive, and the Russians had been pushed again from the instant neighborhood of Pechenihy. Extra promisingly, Pechenihy’s college, which had been hit by Russian artillery the earlier 12 months, was set to open an underground shelter beneath the destroyed college, giving schoolchildren an area to socialize after their on-line courses.
In August 2023, as her youthful son was set to start first grade, the household returned to Pechenihy. Drozdova, who had labored in promoting earlier than the conflict, discovered a brand new job instructing Ukrainian, English, and math on the college. In January 2025, a renovation of the underground area enabled college students to start attending in-person courses day by day. “It was only a paradise for us,” Drozdova mentioned. “All of the tools we would have liked for training was within the college.”
However in March 2025, three Russian drones hit the renovated college at evening. Although no one was on website, the strikes severed the ability strains and partially flooded the underground amenities, rendering the lecture rooms frigid and unusable. A restore is projected to value at the least $1 million—excess of the cash-strapped village can afford.
College students stand in an underground classroom at their college in Pechenihy, Ukraine, on March 19, 2025. Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
I visited Pechenihy in December 2025, throughout a winter of gloom and energy outages. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had fizzled out years earlier, and although the Russians are not instantly throughout the river from Pechenihy, a gentle stream of missiles and drones continues to bombard the realm almost day by day. “We’re terribly afraid. We punish ourselves in our minds that kids dwell right here,” Pechenihy resident Dariia Pokhodenko, who has two school-age daughters, instructed me.
With their college gone once more, Pokhodenko and Drozdova’s kids, together with tons of of different college students in Pechenihy, obtain their training through a patchwork on-line curriculum. Power energy cuts have made sustained video calls unattainable, leaving college students to spend their days trudging via asynchronous assignments. In early December, throughout one of the crucial festive occasions of the 12 months, the youngsters of Pechenihy watched a video of Saint Nicholas Day celebrations on their telephones and TV screens.
When Drozdova left Schmallenberg, she mentioned her government-assigned interpreter known as her a “felony” for bringing her kids again to Pechenihy. “I got here again right here for the Ukrainian college,” Drozdova mentioned. “However now I can’t even inform you why I’m nonetheless right here.”
First graders on the primary day of the brand new college 12 months in Irpin, Ukraine, on Sept. 1, 2025.Genya Savilov/AFP through Getty Pictures
Because the starting of the conflict, Russian assaults have destroyed one in seven Ukrainian academic amenities. “[This is] a tactic of terror and disruption of any types of common life,” mentioned Anna Novosad, founding father of the savED basis, a Ukrainian academic NGO.
The dimensions of academic losses from 4 consecutive educational years misplaced to conflict—and earlier than that, two years misplaced to COVID—are tough to exactly quantify, but simply eight months into the conflict, the drop in studying for Ukrainian kids was similar to lacking two years’ worth of school. No one expects that determine to have improved, particularly whereas over one-third of scholars in Ukraine proceed to lack entry to full-time in-person training. “We [have] a era of main college children who would possibly effectively have by no means been to highschool bodily,” Novosad mentioned.
Ukrainian kids have additionally endured isolation, suffered via Russian occupation, been bombed, and misplaced mother and father on the entrance line. Some react by closing themselves off from the world; others grow to be aggressive in a bid for consideration. With out assist, “these kids might be traumatized adults who will lack emotional intelligence,” mentioned Olha Bihun, a psychologist who works with kids within the Kyiv area.
“Kids who research in European colleges have high quality training. These in occupied territory have the Russian propaganda academic system. It’s even completely completely different contained in the nation, between those that attend college offline and those that research on-line,” Roman Hryshchuk, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who sits on the training committee, instructed me. “The inequality, it’s enormous.”
Such inequalities are seen in locations like Bohdanivka, a modest agricultural village close to Kyiv. For weeks within the spring of 2022, Russian forces camped out within the native college, venturing out to . “You simply mainly went to mattress, and also you didn’t know whether or not you’d get up,” mentioned Olena Bobko, a neighborhood mom of two.
Native residents stroll previous a destroyed kindergarten in Bohdanivka on April 12, 2022. Genya Savilov/AFP through Getty Pictures
In April 2022, when the Russians retreated, they set fireplace to the varsity, gutting the constructing and forsaking a terrorized inhabitants. The youngsters “noticed every part with their very own eyes,” mentioned Anna Tkachenko, a math and laptop science instructor within the village.
But Bohdanivka is cautiously on the highway to restoration. With the assistance of savED, the village’s former group corridor was renovated into a college for elementary schoolers; the nonprofit additionally constructed a brand new modular facility with six school rooms for the center schoolers. All 250 schoolchildren in Bohdanivka attend in-person college 5 days every week, studying to code on donated laptops, collaborating in on-line video games in well being class, and exercising in makeshift fitness center periods.
The occupation casts a protracted shadow. Fifth graders, as soon as once more socializing in school rooms, carefully comply with the progress of the conflict on-line and darkly murmur to one another that Russian President Vladimir Putin is promoting Ukrainian kids “by the kilo”—their interpretation of Russia’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Nonetheless, the youngsters are rebounding remarkably effectively, from becoming a member of extracurricular golf equipment to organizing a pupil authorities, Bohdanivka college principal Lyudmyla Deyko instructed me. “These are our college students. We understood that we’ve got to do every part to maintain the youngsters in our [community],” Deyko mentioned. “They know that the adults have taken care of a spot for them to have their childhood.”
On the opposite facet of Ukraine, in villages like Pechenihy, few such areas exist. Although Drozdova sometimes hosts cooking courses for college students at her residence, formal in-person courses stay prohibited. Consequently, “the youngsters haven’t any communication,” she mentioned. “They will’t put collectively sentences to indicate what’s on their minds. … We will’t predict what might be subsequent, as a result of we’re the primary mother and father which are [raising] this useless era.”
Kids stroll down a hall at an underground college in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Oct. 16, 2025.Oleksii Filippov/AFP through Getty Pictures
There are few alternatives for older college students to enterprise out by themselves. In Kharkiv, a metropolis in jap Ukraine devastated by Russian strikes, I visited Uyava, a group area that hosts frequent occasions for youngsters and younger adults in beanbag-filled rooms fitted with blast-resistant home windows.
Over time, a robust group of regulars has shaped, but for many attendees, Uyava is the one place the place they’ll socialize and mingle with their friends. Whereas some college students in college meet offline, in-person gatherings are “tremendous forbidden” for prime schoolers, mentioned Uyava co-founder Vasylisa Haidenko.
However reminders abound that the youngsters who spend their nights at Uyava might miss out on a future altogether. As Haidenko and I spoke, we sipped cups of steaming, aromatic tea. The mix was created by a younger man from Kharkiv who had dreamed of opening a teahouse within the metropolis earlier than he died preventing within the conflict, Haidenko instructed me.
In the meantime, within the occupied territories stretching throughout the nation’s jap area, Ukrainian schoolchildren are compelled to enroll in Russian-language colleges that supply up a noxious mix of Russian propaganda and military training for 8-year-olds.
Because the invasion, a unfastened community of governmental and non-governmental entities has supplied secret on-line courses centered on Ukrainian language and historical past in a bid to maintain the 1.6 million schoolchildren residing below Russian occupation anchored, one way or the other, to Ukraine. Taking part in these courses, which college students often attend anonymously and through burner telephones, is fraught with hazard. Russian authorities have detained parents and threatened to torture lecturers after discovering proof of a Ukrainian training—an uncanny echo of the Stalin-era Soviet insurance policies that after repressed Ukrainian language and culture.
College students and oldsters who proceed to participate within the Ukrainian system are below huge pressure. Nataliia, a instructor who spoke on the situation of anonymity, instructed me that her college students within the occupied territories are afraid of college breaks, when they’re disadvantaged of their solely alternative to work together with Ukraine. “Our college is oxygen for them,” she mentioned.
Final 12 months, Nataliia’s digital college district taught round 1,500 college students; this 12 months, she mentioned, enrollment dropped to 900 college students. The declining numbers mirror a fraying connection to Ukraine throughout the occupied territories. As a result of mother and father typically decline to enroll their first graders in Ukrainian college for safety and logistical causes, some digital colleges not have any first graders, mentioned Kateryna Tymchenko, a undertaking supervisor overseeing Ukrainian training within the occupied territories.
After her metropolis was occupied in spring 2022, Nataliia fled to western Ukraine. She typically wonders about discovering a neighborhood job as an alternative of spending lengthy hours on-line as an underpaid instructor, but one thing all the time adjustments her thoughts. “The variety of kids is reducing, however, effectively, how can I go away them?” Nataliia mentioned. “That is actual braveness—to be a web based pupil in Ukrainian college from the occupied territories.”
Oksana Pomyliaiko, director of the village college, factors to a crater on the ceiling of the varsity fitness center in Pechenihy on March 19, 2025. Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
In any postwar state of affairs, the cascading academic disparities may have far-reaching impacts. “Academic losses can really have an effect on the GDP of a rustic,” mentioned Nadia Leshchyk, the tutorial ombudsman of Ukraine.
How precisely to bridge such inequalities, nonetheless, stays a “fairly painful” query, Leshchyk mentioned. Although few in Kyiv brazenly encourage households to remain in front-line areas—and sometimes, the households are those who refuse to depart—policymakers additionally perceive that evacuating villages like Pechenihy will result in harsh financial penalties for jap Ukraine.
“It’s unattainable to completely shut the faculties” close to the entrance line, mentioned Hryshchuk, the Ukrainian parliamentarian, including that the transfer would lead lecturers to lose their jobs and ship a “unhealthy sign” for these areas. “Everybody expects that we assist the area and people communities on the entrance line.”
From Kyiv, even the essential image of training below occupation is hazy. The federal government enrolls greater than 34,000 college students within the occupied territories, based on the federal government, although that determine itself is unsure; to remain protected, not all college students go online day by day.
A bunch of youngsters stroll towards a broken college in Bohdanivka on April 14, 2022.Fadel Senna/AFP through Getty Pictures
“There’s not sufficient assist from the federal government for lecturers who work with college students in occupied territories. They aren’t taught tips on how to do it. They simply merely don’t get any assist,” mentioned Olha Koval, co-founder of ZNOVU, an NGO that works with college students below Russian occupation.
“The state is simply not in a position to deal with every part,” Novosad, the savED founder, mentioned. “It’s kind of a gentleman’s settlement that civil society organizations typically are [the ones who] have energy.”
Civil society teams are, in flip, reliant on the whims of overseas support donors like the USA. The modular center college constructed in Bohdanivka was funded partially by the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement. “We had been speculated to have funds for 20 colleges like that. We managed to do six, which was higher than nothing,” Novosad mentioned.
After returning to Pechenihy, Drozdova resigned herself to pondering that the miseries of the conflict had been past her management. “I actually consider that if I’m to die from a rocket, I won’t be able to flee it,” she mentioned. But Drozdova nonetheless has her sons to consider; she wonders whether or not the youngsters of western Ukraine, with their in-person courses and distance from the entrance line, may have higher childhoods than the youngsters of Pechenihy. If the tutorial state of affairs doesn’t enhance within the subsequent few years, she should take into account leaving Pechenihy once more.
As soon as extra, households are slowly trickling out of a village that Oleksandr Husarov, the pinnacle of the Pechenihy navy administration, proudly instructed me is “like Switzerland” in the summertime. “In fact, it hurts—younger folks with children leaving our group,” mentioned Olha Kyzim, the Pechenihy college principal. “However we perceive security is the precedence. The primary precedence is life. We have now hope that they are going to come again.”
