The students meet a day a week for lessons in a tiny underground classroom that teachers call the beehive, for the buzzing of all the children packed inside.
Holding classes above ground in this part of Ukraine, in the city of Balakliya near the front line, is considered too dangerous because of the ever-present threat of Russian missiles and drones. Children spend most of their time in online classes and take turns going to school underground.
“When they come, they often ask me, ‘Can we see our former classroom?’” said Inna Mandryka, a deputy principal. The teachers, she said, never imagined children longing for school so much.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was intended to undermine the country’s future in many ways, stamping out language and culture, destroying infrastructure and leveling whole cities with bombs in the country’s east.
Disruption to the education of Ukraine’s 3.7 million schoolchildren is one of the most serious challenges for the country. Classes have been repeatedly interrupted, leaving many students far behind academically, experts say. Children are also losing their soft skills, such as communication and conflict resolution, from being unable to interact enough with other students.
Providing classes of any kind has been a huge obstacle for the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.
Air raid alerts have regularly interrupted lessons for those attending school, sending children tramping through hallways to basements, often for hours. Most students study partly online and attend school in person for one or more days a week. In more dangerous parts of the country, closer to the front line, students attend classes in underground bomb shelters. Fourteen percent of children studying the Ukrainian curriculum do so entirely online, including about 300,000 joining lessons from abroad, according to the education ministry.
The limitations mean that many Ukrainian children still chat with their classmates only on computer screens.
“It makes it very difficult for children to feel connected,” said Emmanuelle Abrioux, the head of the education section at UNICEF in Ukraine.
At the Balakliya elementary school, children study four days online and one day in the underground classroom. By law, the school can accept only as many students as it can fit in its bomb shelter, leaving the children to study there on rotation.
At least 137 underground schools have been built in Ukraine, mainly in the east and south of the country, according to the education ministry.
Many Ukrainians also stay online by choice. Internally displaced people in the country, for instance, often prefer for their children to stay in their old schools online rather than attending schools in person near their new homes. The result has been a virtual community online for the ruined cities of eastern Ukraine.
Iryna, a special needs teacher, is from Sievierodonetsk (which Ukraine’s Parliament last year renamed Siverskodonetsk), a city occupied by Russia since June 2022, and later fled to Vinnytsia in central Ukraine. She asked to use only her first name, because her relatives live in an area under Russian occupation.
She continues to work with her old school, which now operates only online, and keeps her son enrolled there, too. She said it was comforting to hold onto a bit of their home after they fled.
The government is discouraging such practices as part of a broader plan to push for in-person schooling where possible. In July, the education ministry published a plan for 2025 aiming to bring at least 300,000 children back into schools and limit the number of those studying online.
The proposals stop short of closing the schools, like Iryna’s, that are operating online from exile, but teachers and parents worry that such a move may come later.
Even when schools are virtual, “the people there are real and familiar,” Iryna said, adding, “My colleagues are dear to me.”
She teaches children from all over Ukraine and around Europe, and still has one student in Sievierodonetsk. Fearing persecution, the student rarely joins the online lessons, she said, but the teachers send him tasks to complete. Her other students all appear onscreen, doing their best to duplicate what they did in person before the start of the full-scale invasion.
“Children need us here online, and we try our best to preserve what we have,” she said.
For those under Russian occupation, joining Ukrainian online schools is a big risk. The occupation authorities force them to attend local schools and study the Russian curriculum, residents of the occupied regions say.
Hanna, 35, a mother of one from Melitopol in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine, said she had lived under occupation for a year and a half before fleeing to another Ukrainian city in August 2023. She said she did not want to provide her full name as she still has family in Melitopol who might be at risk.
In the first year of the occupation, she said, her 6-year-old son studied at a Ukrainian school remotely. Russian soldiers once searched their home, looking for weapons. “They saw that the child was young and didn’t force us to attend Russian school,” she said. But she kept his online classes in a Ukrainian school secret not only from Russian soldiers, but also from neighbors.
She said she was alarmed one day when, talking with other children at a playground, her son mentioned Ukrainian authors he had been studying in his online classes. “I quickly shouted at him, ‘Quiet! It’s not allowed to speak of this here,’” she said.
While online classes — which were first started during the Covid pandemic — have now become routine for many Ukrainian schoolchildren, some critics say that instruction remains bogged down in an old-fashioned educational system.
The government provides books but no guidance on how to make lessons interactive and more engaging for students, said Tymofiy Brik, the dean of the Kyiv School of Economics.
With online education, it is harder to maintain children’s interest than in classrooms, he said, so it is up to individual teachers to find ways of engaging their classes. “Some kids are luckier than others,” he said.
Still, Ms. Abrioux of UNICEF said that educators had learned some lessons about online learning during the pandemic that had helped with their planning when the war started.
“In a way, ironically, we’re quite fortunate to be in a situation where there was quite a lot of research done after the pandemic on the impact of school closures and disrupted education on children’s schooling,” she said.
In Ukraine, the children’s fund started several projects aimed at helping students catch up that included training teachers and paying them to provide after-school classes in person. The fund also supplies laptops to teachers and children who need them.
While such efforts have helped with online learning, many parents and children are impatient for in-person classes to start again in schools.
Svitlana Stepurenko, 34, and her 9- and 12-year-old daughters left Ukraine after Russian forces occupied Balakliya. They fled to Norway, where the children now study as they wait for the war to end so they can return to their old school.
The girls, like tens of thousands of other children in refugee families abroad, attend local schools and then log in to Ukrainian lessons online in the afternoon. Ms. Stepurenko worries that her children will find it difficult to catch up with their classmates in Ukraine.
“Even if it is nice here,” she said, “we miss home and want to go back to our school very much.”
