Nearby, children laugh, trying to keep up with their English teacher as she sings and gestures “Head and shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes!” each repetition gets a little faster. Unique in Ukraine, the Volodymyr the Great Number 23 school on the outskirts of Kiev trains children to become military cadets, starting at the age of 7. They are sent to this day boarding school to learn discipline, but many now see the skills taught here as essential to their survival, returning to the classroom with the country at war. The school officially opens on Friday for the first time since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Many of his 540 students took part in a rehearsal Thursday for the opening ceremony, the boys in black and gold military uniforms, often slightly oversized and reminiscent of the Soviet era, with wide-brimmed hats and heavy shoulder boards. In formation, students carried tassels of blue and yellow ‒ the national colors ‒ moving in time as the music alternated between nursery rhymes and military anthems. Many cadet schools were established in the Soviet republics, but Volodymyr the Great’s students were all born long after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and were not pressured in recent years to join the military when they graduated. Yaroslav, a 16-year-old student at the school, always wanted to study law and experience life in Western Europe. But his school is just a few kilometers (miles) from where the Russian advance left neighborhoods pulverized by artillery fire, civilians dumped in mass graves and behavior hardened among ordinary Ukrainians. “I’ll be honest with you… I want to fight in this war,” says Yaroslav. “I’ve always wanted to travel, but this decision changed. I want to be a soldier.” Yaroslav’s father, an army engineer, was killed when war first broke out in the east of the country in 2014. “My father was not afraid to go to the front, and I want to be like that,” said Yaroslav. Many of his classmates said they were inspired by the bravery displayed by Ukraine’s armed forces during the five-week siege of Kiev that ended with the Russian retreat. “We’re constantly getting stronger and becoming one of the best armies in Europe, so we can hold the Russians back,” says Yaroslav’s classmate Bohdan. “And thanks to these fighters standing on the front lines, we can keep going.” Their English teacher Olha Kyrei, who has taught at the school for nine years, says she has seen a difference in her students since the war began. “I think maybe in a month they got more serious,” he said. “The eyes, when you look at the eyes, you don’t look into the children’s eyes. You look into the eyes of adults.” Kyrei keeps in touch with school leavers ‒ referring to them as “my kids” ‒ who have been recruited, texting them “almost every day”. She hopes the war will be over by the time her current batch of students graduates. “We are praying for the graduates of our school in June 2023,” he said. “We pray that all will be well by then: This situation, this awful situation, this war will be over.” School Principal Natalia Holovyhyna said two former students had already been killed in the war. At school and during months of online classes, Holovyhyna and her teachers say they try to keep the kids busy with extra work and activities to stop them from obsessing over the war. Teachers, he said, chose to stay in Kyiv when the fighting began, continuing classes online from their homes and volunteering to keep school facilities open so locals could use bomb shelters. “I’m very proud of them,” says Holovyhyna, pausing with emotion. “Our teachers focus on making the learning process comfortable… We raise them to be professional engineers, doctors, teachers and soldiers as well.”
Adam Pemble in Kyiv, Ukraine contributed.
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