“Blackouts and air raid alerts don’t stop us now”
After a cold winter and remote learning, schools in Chernihiv region prepare for a new winter
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Anya walks hesitantly between the desks, trying to work out which one will soon be hers. In a few days she starts 10th grade, and she is more nervous than she was on her very first day of school.
“The last time I sat at a school desk was in fourth grade. After all these years, this will be the first time I’m back in a classroom with other children”
The war took away her home, her school and the chance to study in person. Shelling forced her family to leave eastern Ukraine and move to the Chernihiv region. Now, after several years of online classes, Anya is relearning what it means to write with chalk on a blackboard, joke with friends during break, and pack a school bag.
Preparations for 1 September are in full swing: flower beds are being planted, furniture repainted and textbooks handed out. But after a difficult winter, the school is preparing not only for a new academic year but for the cold as well, topping up water supplies in the shelter, checking the backup power system and connecting inverters. In a few days the school will hold its First Bell ceremony, an event some children have waited years to attend.
“I’m from Mykolaivka, near Sloviansk. My city is destroyed, my home and school are ruined. We moved to the village of Varva. From September, Varva Lyceum will start in-person classes. There’s a safe shelter here, autonomous heating, and I’ll be able to go to school without interruption. I want to study again, catch up, and make friends”
A hard winter to remember
Varva Lyceum No. 1 has a long history. This year marks its 90th graduating class. But according to principal Tetiana Pryshchenko, last winter was one of the hardest the school has faced in years.
“It was a turbulent year. And not only because of the air raid alerts and the danger, but because of an unusually cold winter. There were days when we had no electricity for 18 hours”
Tetiana spent the past year trying to keep classes running through blackouts and shelling.
Because of the cold, the lyceum switched to remote learning last year, but that came with its own difficulties, - such as frequent, long air raid alerts and power cuts.
“No electricity meant no heating, no way to feed the children, no connection. It was a hard winter. One that also took a toll on learning and caused real learning loss. Knowledge levels dropped, as they did across the whole country”
Late last year, the government funded the construction of a large, safe shelter with autonomous heating at Varva Lyceum No. 1. It is stocked with clean drinking water, toilets, internet access and an alert system. Thanks to funding from the German government, channeled through UNICEF, the school installed hybrid inverters and batteries to keep the shelter’s power supply running without interruption.
“We no longer depend on blackouts and the cold. The inverters give us backup power, so even in the shelter we’ll have light, heat and internet. You could say the shelter is now our second school — underground, a separate educational hub, energy-independent”
Tetiana gives a tour of the new shelter, which can hold nearly all of the lyceum’s roughly 500 students.
In 2026, 1,380 education facilities across eight Ukrainian regions received a one-off payment from UNICEF, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) via the German Development Bank (KfW). The funding will help schools and preschools reduce disruptions caused by power cuts and lack of heating, so 400,000 children can keep learning in person or in blended formats, even through a cold winter. Germany provided similar funding to another 700 schools under this programme during the winters of 2024 and 2025.
Catching up on lost time
The hard winter was one of the reasons Anya decided to switch from online classes at her school in Mykolaivka to in-person learning at Varva Lyceum. Last winter, she had almost no lessons at all.
“This winter was hard on us. We often had no electricity or heating, so we had to dress warmly and use blankets. We heated ourselves with gas or heating pads. I barely studied at school, because almost no one had electricity. Neither the teachers nor the students”
Anya tried to work through the material on her own.
Now she is anxious about her upcoming exams, knowing how much she has to catch up on. She admits she is even a little scared to think about university entrance exams.
“I really hope I can catch up now, especially in maths and history,” Anya says. She adds that she has barely had a PE class in four years. This subject is especially hard to learn online.
To stay in shape, she joined a local hiking club that trains in the gym at Varva Lyceum No. 1. That is how she met students there and first saw the school she would later choose to join.
“I miss home so much. My Mykolaivka, my room, my friends. But my friends aren’t there anymore, they’ve all left. And my home is gone too, it’s destroyed. The whole city is badly damaged. So I think what I miss most is the memories. That’s why I’d like to make friends here”
Anya hopes this school year will bring her plenty of new experiences to remember.
Nothing replaces being there in person
Anya’s future classmate, 14-year-old Andrii, is looking forward to 1 September. He was born and lives in Varva, a village in Chernihiv region far from the front line, more than 100 kilometers from the border with Russia. But even here, children feel the impact of the war.
“The war has affected my nervous system. When a Shahed drone hit a building near my home, my blood pressure shot up, my mood started swinging, and I began to withdraw. As the air raid alerts became less frequent, I gradually adjusted”
Andrii adds that school and sport help him cope with anxiety.
Over the years of the full-scale war, Andrii has studied in person, online and in blended formats. But he is certain nothing can replace being there in person. After a long stretch of remote learning last year, he is hoping 10th grade will be different, thanks to the shelter and backup power.
“We had lessons over the phone, we studied in the gym because we didn’t have a shelter. In winter we switched to remote learning, and I studied at home with a flashlight. Sometimes I couldn’t even connect to a lesson because of a bad signal. But now we have a proper shelter, and the air raid alerts don’t stop us anymore”
He dreams of a good education and of traveling.
As a local, Andrii gives Anya a tour of the shelter, which she hasn’t seen yet. “Down here, we won’t even notice if there’s a blackout upstairs now,” he says, showing her their future classroom.
Anya picks up a piece of chalk and writes her name on the board. Then she smiles broadly.
