In Kharkiv, school starts beneath the city. Since 2024, pupils in Ukraine’s second-largest urban center have attended classes underground, a wartime adaptation to relentless Russian missile and drone strikes that has turned metro stations and purpose-built shelters into classrooms.
Kharkiv sits roughly 30 kilometers from the front line. At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the city was heavily bombed; today, air raid alerts still sound multiple times a day, sending a metronomic reminder of danger across a city determined to carry on. That reality has reshaped the most basic ritual of childhood. To keep education going while shielding students from bombardment, authorities and communities have carved a parallel school system below street level.
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The scale is striking. City officials count 21 underground schools serving about 55,000 children in spaces designed for protection as much as learning. Some are newly built shelters engineered to withstand blasts. Others are sections of Kharkiv’s metro network repurposed to host lessons, desks and digital boards where commuters once waited for trains. Together, they form a subterranean district of classrooms that aligns schooling with survival.
This is education reimagined under siege, where the push and pull of a normal school day—roll call, lessons, homework—unfolds in spaces chosen precisely because they are far from normal. The hazards that make this system necessary are constant: Officials warn of incoming attacks routinely, and the city’s sirens cut through aboveground routines. By bringing pupils below, Kharkiv reduces the split-second trade-offs families face when those warnings sound.
The underground schools open a window onto the way a city adapts under pressure. They are a response to more than military risk; they are an argument for continuity, a way to knit stability into lives punctured by alerts and explosions. The approach also recognizes the social role schools play—places where children see friends, where routines steady a day, and where parents, too, can plan around predictable schedules. Even amid war, school remains a daily anchor.
Much of this network is intentionally practical. Purpose-built shelters double as classrooms, fitted to handle large groups and structured learning as well as to protect. In metro stations, areas are set aside to separate education from transit, with rows of tables and whiteboards set up along platforms or in adjoining spaces. It is an inversion of public space: infrastructure once dedicated to movement now underwrites a different sort of progress.
Kharkiv’s proximity to the front line makes the choice urgent. Cities elsewhere in Ukraine have adjusted to the war in different ways, but few face the same daily rhythm of alerts and intercepted strikes. Here, where threat is both routine and unpredictable, the city’s underground network is less a stopgap than a system—an institutional answer to a long crisis. It offers a measure of certainty in a conflict that frequently strips it away.
Families have learned to navigate this underground world. The school run may include a descent into a station or shelter entrance; the day’s schedule is calibrated to shared, secured spaces. The rules mirror those inside any schoolhouse—line up, listen, take notes—but win their force from the sheltering walls around them. In this way, form and function move together: education is made possible by infrastructure, and infrastructure finds renewed public purpose through education.
For teachers and administrators, the logistics are demanding but essential. Shifting lessons into protected spaces requires coordination—accommodating multiple classes, managing entrances and exits, and ensuring that learning materials are at hand. Yet these challenges are framed by a single priority: reduce exposure to danger while keeping classrooms open. The core mission remains unchanged. Children need an education; they are getting it, even if the setting is unorthodox.
The city’s efforts are not only functional. They are emblematic. To send children to school underground is to affirm that the future matters, that lessons about language, science and history carry weight in a present defined by war. It is a visible statement about resilience—one measured not by headlines, but by attendance registers and the daily thrum of schooling in a place built to resist shockwaves.
RTÉ News, which visited two of Kharkiv’s 21 underground schools, has shown how these classrooms operate in practice. Video from the broadcaster captures the core facts: children learning in protected environments; teachers adapting to new spaces; a city that has reallocated part of its transit and civil defense backbone to shield education from the worst of the fighting. Those images underscore what numbers already suggest—that this is a citywide undertaking with tens of thousands of pupils at its center.
The need for such measures reflects the enduring volatility of the war’s second year and beyond. Despite improved air defenses, long-range strikes and drones still target infrastructure and urban areas across Ukraine. Kharkiv’s pattern of alert-and-response has hardened into habit, and the underground schools are built for exactly that cadence: when danger comes suddenly and repeatedly, safety needs to be immediate and dependable.
No one in Kharkiv would choose this arrangement. But the project’s very existence speaks to a larger truth about how communities persist under bombardment. In war, survival is essential. So is learning. The underground schools bind those imperatives together, translating them into daily practice. What emerges is a portrait of a city that has absorbed shock and answered with structure.
Above ground, Kharkiv’s scars are visible. Below, in these improvised and engineered spaces, another story is being written—one of classrooms carried forward under the weight of conflict, of parents and teachers making the unthinkable workable, and of children who are asked to do something both ordinary and extraordinary: go to school, even as the alarms keep sounding.
In the end, the most important measure of the system’s success may be its quietness. There is no drama in a completed homework assignment, no headline in a settled timetable. Yet in a city that has long been a target, that is the point. The underground schools are designed to make normal life possible where it has no right to be. In Kharkiv, the school bell rings beneath the earth—and class, against the odds, is in session.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
