The sound of bombs pounding Kharkiv was the first thing Polina Chub heard on the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
It was February 24, 2022, and Chub, then 16, was asleep in her bed. There had been rumors that Russia would invade, but like many Ukrainians, Chub had not taken them too seriously. At first she thought the roaring sound outside her bedroom window was fireworks, but soon realized the war had actually begun. Chub hid under the covers and covered her ears while thinking, No, this is not happening. I am sleeping.
Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, a neighboring country, happened in the early hours of the morning. In a televised event, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine. In the hours that followed, Russia attacked Ukraine from every direction, and the entire country was thrown into a state of chaos and uncertainty.
Kharkiv is a city in eastern Ukraine, a region that shares a border with Russia, and was one of the first places to see heavy fighting on its streets. According to the United Nations International Organization for Migration, more than seven million Ukrainians were internally displaced by the end of May of that year, and people from the Kharkiv region alone made up 27% of that number.
While crowds of people ran to Kharkiv's central station, after packing their lives into a few suitcases in a desperate attempt to leave the area, Chub and her family remained.
As their parents went to emergency meetings for work and collected money from nearby ATMs, Chub and her then 13-year-old brother stayed home, boiling potatoes and eggs to eat in case their electricity was shut off. While Chub cooked and gathered candles in the apartment, she received a message: Her physics teacher had sent her class an exam to take.
After Chub's parents returned, the family ran to their dirty, cement basement to shelter from the war. The next day, Chub’s stepfather voluntarily joined the military and fought to defend Kharkiv. For the next two weeks, Chub, her brother, and their mother lived in the basement, where they slept on the floor, on wooden panels lined with thin foam, cardboard, pillows, and blankets.
Chub distracted herself by studying English, reading books, and attempting to do schoolwork virtually, but the situation in Kharkiv got worse as the war continued. She barely spoke during that time, and was depressed by how the war was unfolding all around her. Attacks on Kharkiv were constant at the time, but sleep was an escape for the 16-year-old, who says she was not stirred by the sounds of explosions raging outside.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, Chub, her mother, uncle, brother, and cat fled to the western Ivano-Frankivsk region. They lived as refugees in a room in a distant family friend's house for five months. Now, at 18, Chub plans to leave Ukraine for the next four years.
The Chance to Leave
As part of Ukraine Global Scholars, a nonprofit that connects Ukrainian teens with scholarships to international boarding schools and colleges, Chub is hoping to be accepted to a college in the US. She has applied to 20 schools and is still waiting to hear where she got in. After she has chosen a college, Chub will leave behind her entire childhood in Ukraine, balancing the pain and trauma of having lived in a war-torn country with the rush of campus life.
According to an August 2023 report by UNICEF, there were 6.7 million children from age three to 18 in Ukraine; in March 2022, the war led to the displacement of 4.3 million children. Children in Ukraine have experienced widespread learning loss. Internet outages are common, and classes are disrupted by air-raid sirens that force entire schools to evacuate to bomb shelters to wait out attacks.
Only one-third of Ukrainians in grade school were learning fully in-person, the report stated. In completely remote learning areas, students attended Zoom classes for a fourth year, after COVID-19 had already stolen almost two years of their full educational experience.
Remote learning was hard for Chub, who had to study in the bomb shelter in Kharkiv, the small room in western Ukraine, and in an apartment her family moved to in Cherkasy in late-summer 2022. In Cherkasy, Chub says, when there were electricity outages because of Russian attacks, “I lit the candles and did the schoolwork.”
At the time, Chub was studying for her national exams, or NMTs, which are like entrance exams for university. “I had my laptop with me, but I didn't want to waste the battery," she recalls. "I wrote as much as possible on my paper, everything with candles. I just tried to do everything when I had the daylight. So then I could not worry about it when I don't have electricity.”
Ukraine Global Scholars (UGS) offers hope for the 250 high school students it supports with over $62 million in combined scholarships to top global boarding schools and colleges. In return for the opportunity to live abroad and receive a Western education, UGS students commit to returning to Ukraine after their studies and using their degrees to rebuild the country.
Chernivtsi Safe Haven
Yuliia Horobets, 16, hopes that UGS will help her develop a career in Ukraine’s government. She is about to move to the US for five years, and is excited about the chance to meet new people and teach them about Ukrainian history and culture, with an added aim to show them that Ukraine is not the same as Russia.
Horobets is from Chernivtsi, a town in southwestern Ukraine that is tucked far enough away from Russia that it’s difficult to target. “Our city is on the border. We’re somewhere [where we're] not invaded, but we’re affected by it," she explains. "I’m trying to help with as much humanitarian aid as possible.”
Although Horobets has been safe from the physical impacts of the war, the emotional aspects of it have taken a toll on her. For three years, she spoke nearly every day to a friend in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine that was occupied by Russian troops in March 2022 and remained under their control for more than eight months. For the first three months of the war, Horobets texted her friend almost every day; then he went silent for two weeks.
“His parents contacted me after two weeks and said that he passed away," Horobets says. "A missile hit his house directly. Hit him.”
After the war took away her close friend, Horobets says, “I’ve started to appreciate lots of things. I spend lots of time with my family. I started to be even more compassionate.”
Chernivtsi has a haven for the around 100,000 internally displaced Ukrainians (as of May 2023) who moved to the region in the aftermath of the invasion. But in the early days of the war, the streets of Chernivtsi were filled with chaos. Frantic, internally displaced people were met by volunteers who tried to help support them, providing warm food, winter clothes, and places to sleep for the Ukrainians who had been forced to leave everything behind.
Sasha Lintovska turned 15 during this uncertain period. “It was really chaotic," she says. "Still, people were so united. The first three days, I was just lying in my bed. I really didn’t understand what was going on. But then I found an opportunity to volunteer.”
At that time, Lintovska’s family had taken in another family who had fled from Kyiv, Ukraine's capital city, as Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fought on the streets. For three months, the family from Kyiv lived in Lintovska’s two-room home. She gave up her bedroom and slept beside her parents’ bed while using a pool float as a mattress.
The future of Ukraine was so uncertain, but Lintovska sprung into action: She helped make camouflage nets for the military, distributed humanitarian aid, and gave lectures about Ukrainian art, history, and culture.
Now 16, Lintovska has found opportunities she had not considered before the war. A famous Ukrainian scriptwriter held a free master class for teenagers in Chernivtsi. It was the first time Lintovska learned about filmmaking, which has since become her passion.
In April 2022, she began writing an eight-part limited series about a teenage girl, named Anya, living on the front lines. Anya was bullied at school and had a bad relationship with her mother. The girl had planned to die by suicide on February 24, 2022, but in the aftermath of the invasion, her decision was disrupted.
“She goes with her mom as a refugee to the Chernivtsi region, and the war gives her a new life," Lintovska explains. “We hear a lot of stories that the war just stole the lives of thousands of people — good people. But the war gave us a lot,” like a sense of community, a fight for the same cause, and a burning desire to never again be part of Russia. “It’s important to highlight good things because we are always focused only on bad stuff,” she adds. "If you try hard, you can find good things in everything.”
Lintovska is now preparing to move to the US, where she will attend a boarding school that has yet to be decided. St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, though, is one of the schools she most hopes to attend. “They have brilliant art courses and excellent humanities at the same time," she says. "Their campus is bigger than my entire town.”
Once she's in the US, Lintovska hopes to educate her peers on the importance of Ukrainian culture, which has been historically overlooked in comparison with Russian culture.
“When you’re a teenager, you learn much more about yourself every year," Lintovska says. "I learned a lot about the price of life. My life changed significantly, and I started appreciating my life.”
She continues, “Being a teenager in Ukraine is strange, crazy, and lonely sometimes. But at the same time, I understand that Ukraine is more united than ever before.”
Family in Arms
Back in Kharkiv, Chub eagerly awaits acceptance letters from the schools where she has applied. Her stepfather still fights to protect Ukraine, and her mother works in another city. She and her younger brother live alone in their once-vibrant town.
Recently, for her 18th birthday, Chub’s mother and stepfather gave her a necklace — she never takes it off. The necklace is the fingerprint of both of her parents in the shape of a heart and serves as a small part of them that she can take with her everywhere she goes.
Chub worries, she says: “I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about my mother.”
Ukraine’s military has approximately 500,000 active service members. Some, like Chub’s stepfather, joined during the invasion, while others served before the war began.
Kateryna Horeva’s brother has been serving in the military since 2020. He is 24 now, serving on the eastern front lines. “I am naturally worried about him since he is in constant danger all the time,” says Horeva, 17. “It’s quite hard to adapt to the reality that your brother can die in the army any minute. But," she adds, "I am also really proud of him.”
Horeva notes that she has the freedom to meet her friends for coffee in Kyiv and benefits from electricity in her apartment because of the defense by Ukrainian soldiers like her brother. This is because Ukraine’s military has pushed back masses of Russian troops during the last two years of war. A few months into the invasion, Russia controlled 20% of Ukraine. Over time, Ukraine’s military has managed to push Russian forces out of the Kyiv region, allowing for some normalcy to return to life, where residents can go to restaurants and meet with friends without being surrounded by fighting on the streets.
When the war began, however, the fate of Kyiv was uncertain. Russian troops had advanced on the outskirts of the city.
A Child of War
At 15, Horeva was a typical teenager, balancing academics with extracurricular activities. She attended music school, where she took piano and choir lessons, and she loved computer programming. At the start of the war, Horeva’s family chose not to leave Ukraine or their home; instead, they waited for Ukraine’s military to eventually push Russian soldiers out of the Kyiv region three months later.
But during the fight for control of Kyiv, Horeva recalls, “I was afraid of dying, at first. I started rethinking my life in general.” She remembers thinking, If I die this minute, would I regret something or would I be happy with the things I’ve done in my life?
During the beginning of the war, missile attacks in Kyiv were constant, and on the outskirts of Kyiv, the suburban towns of Bucha and Irpin were under Russian occupation. As reported by Reuters, a Ukrainian fundraising initiative, UNITED24, put the total number of deaths in occupied areas of Kyiv at 1,137, including 461 in Bucha alone, as of November 2023. “I started this journey of accepting that I can die in a minute," Horeva says. “It was concerning.”
In the two years since, Horeva has grown used to the war. On February 7 of this year, Russia launched a total of 64 missiles and drones throughout Ukraine in several waves. Ukraine’s air defense system managed to shoot down 44 of them. But in Kyiv, four people were killed when debris from a missile hit an 18-story building, causing a fire and smashed windows, according to officials, Reuters reported.
One missile fell just under half a mile from Horeva’s home; she was asleep at the time, after sleeping through some of the small explosions that occurred as Ukraine’s air defense system shot down the Russian weapons. But at around 8 a.m., Horeva says, “I jumped right out of [bed], being woken up by one of the loudest explosions” she had heard throughout the war.
“My survival instincts made me run right to the hallway without even thinking,” she says. In homes in Ukraine, hallways — where there is a wall on either side and no windows — are some of the safest places in a building. Another safe location is the bathroom, where, Horeva says, she and her parents immediately went. “We all hid. I was lying in the bathtub. The lights, heating, and hot water went off." The attack had cut off her home’s electricity supply. After the sirens ended, though, Horeva went to school.
Attacks such as these most recent ones have become normal to Horeva, part of the seemingly never-ending war experiences of a teenager in Ukraine. But now she is preparing to leave for at least two years, with help from UGS. She has applied to about 10 schools and is waiting to hear back.
“Realizing that your life would end at 15," says Horeva, "it’s not an easy thing. It seems like there’s more [life] that you can live. I had an amazing life before. I thought if I’m destined to die, Okay.”
Horeva continues, though, “I thought about how I can cherish every moment I have and be grateful. Things we don’t notice in our everyday life become really precious. That was something that I learned from being 15 and thinking about life.”
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