In the basements of Kharkiv, a parallel city: “Here they can forget the war”

The school looks like so many others, with its brightly colored classrooms, clusters of chatty children, and walls covered in multicolored pictures made by the students.

When the headmaster shows me around one of the classrooms, the 7- and 8-year-olds stand up as one. When asked if they like their school, they all answer with a unanimous “yes,” some with shy smiles, before a bell rings and they hurry out the door to attend another class.

This facility, which opened less than a month ago, is unusual, to say the least. It was built deep underground to allow these girls and boys to escape the hail of bombs, drones, and missiles raining down on their city.

It must be said that we are here in Kharkiv [in the east of the country], barely 40 kilometers from the Russian border. The former capital of Ukraine has been the victim of incessant attacks since the start of Vladimir Putin's senseless invasion of the country three years ago.

Last month alone [in April], Moscow launched 136 attacks on the Kharkiv region – damaging 533 buildings in the city, killing 7 people and injuring 230 others.

It takes less than a minute for a missile fired from the nearest Russian border area to hit this now infamous city that the sinister Russian dictator [President Vladimir Putin] tried to take once in 2014 and again in 2022.

Due to its proximity to Russia and the Kremlin's assaults, most of daily life in Ukraine's second-largest city takes place underground – not only the arts, bars and clubs, but also hospitals, kindergartens, restaurants, theaters, and schools.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov tells me that residents were forced to live by the sound of air raid warnings and the roar of constant explosions, and so had no choice but to rebuild their city in a troglodyte [rock-carved] form.

As it happens, an alert starts to sound during our conversation, before a second one when I go to see a marvelous ballet later in the day, in the basement of the imposing Kharkiv Opera House – a symbol of the resilience of this city ravaged by war.

“I'm suffering a lot because I have no desire to force people to live underground,” sighs the chief magistrate as we chat in an underground room in his city, which is still home to some 1.3 million Ukrainians. “It hurts me to see this.”

The school I'm visiting— Kharkiv High School 105 —is the fourth to be built underground in the city. Four more are planned, and six more will be built in metro stations. The city is also planning to build its first underground kindergarten, a project costing nearly €6 million.

Ihor Terekhov tells me that these innovative solutions have since been adopted by two other Ukrainian cities bludgeoned by bombs [underground schools are being built in Kryvyi Rih and Sumy, and in the Zaporizhzhia regions, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Chernihiv]. “If there were no such establishments in the world, it was because there had never been a war like this,” he continues.

I am however