​Russia today is “invincible” as it was during the Second World War, Vladimir Putin said Friday at a meeting with teenagers to mark the start of the school year, as some students in the Kremlin-captured country turned to the second school year to classrooms in bomb shelters in a row to protect themselves from Russian missiles and drones, AFP and Reuters reported.

“I understood why we won the Great Patriotic War: it is impossible to defeat a people with such a state of mind. We were absolutely invincible and remain so,” said the Russian president in a televised address, regularly drawing parallels between the war against Nazi Germany and the offensive it launched against Ukraine.

But while Russian students returned to their classrooms on the surface, and the Russian president spoke of the invincibility of his people, for Ukrainian children, Russian attacks mean terror in schools.

Ukrainian students study online or in shelters or, at best, in sheltered schools

Many Ukrainian children, both at home and abroad, have been studying online for the fourth year in a row, their education was destroyed by the Russian invasion, and before that by COVID-19.

Russian airstrikes have destroyed a total of 1,300 schools since President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to the United Nations, which has seen damage to a significant number more.

This week, the Minister of Education of Ukraine, Oksen Lisovyi, reported that 84 percent of schools are now equipped with functional canopies.

“When he was studying online, it wasn’t always possible to get into a bomb shelter,” says 32-year-old Maria Doloban, whose 8-year-old son Oleksii is starting to study at a new school now equipped with a bomb shelter in the capital, Kyiv.

“But he’ll be guarded at school every time the air raid sirens start going off.”

Doloban was one of the millions of refugees who fled Ukraine but, like many others, has since returned, saying he feels better at home than abroad, where children are either learning remotely or struggling in local schools.

They fled from the southern city of Kherson to Thessaloniki in April 2022, but Oleksiy felt lost at school in Greece.

“When I asked him what he did at school, he often said that he was sleeping in class because he was bored and didn’t understand anything,” said Doloban, who visited several Ukrainian cities a year after leaving Greece, and now lives on the outskirts of the capital.

Alexey told his father, a front-line medic, in a video call that he was nervous about starting school, but he joined the other children who danced at the first-day ceremony.

At another school in Kyiv, 6-year-old Ulas Kyrchenko, equipped with new clothes, a suit and a tie, was looking forward to learning about the sea and making friends after spending the first part of the war as a refugee. in Germany.

His mother, Clarissa, said that when she returned to the suburbs of Kyiv, she knew the bombing would continue, so she chose a school in the city in an old building with a bomb shelter in the basement.

The city of Kharkiv can take less than a minute before a missile from Russia arrives, so authorities have had to improvise a way to get children back to school.

Auditoriums were created at the stations of the city’s Soviet metro.

More than 1,000 children will be able to exercise physically in 60 school premises, which were built here, – said the mayor of the city Ihor Terekhov, – this action was welcomed by many parents.

There they will be able to communicate with each other, find a common language, communicate,” said Iryna Loboda on one of the streets of Kharkiv, who was with her son.

Not everyone agrees with the plan.

“Children’s safety comes first,” says another mother, Tetyana Bondar. “My kids will be learning online, even though our school provided a bus to take the kids to the subway.”