Kharkiv’s closed lecture halls and the society they once held together

Sunday 8 February 2026

Kharkiv has long been one of Ukraine’s great university cities. Before the full scale invasion, her reputation rested not only on the number of institutions she hosted but on what those institutions made possible: a dense civic life, a skilled labour market, a research culture, and a rhythm of ordinary days shaped by timetables, libraries, laboratories, student cafés and the steady migration of young people from smaller towns into a city that could widen their horizons. War has not merely damaged buildings in Kharkiv. It has interrupted an entire social mechanism that, in peacetime, turns adolescent potential into professional competence and private ambition into public capacity.

It is now commonplace to say that Ukrainian education has “gone online”. Yet the closure of establishments of Higher and Further Education in Kharkiv is not a neutral technological shift. It is a forced adaptation to violence, proximity to the border and persistent air attack risk. For Kharkiv, the closure is not simply a temporary inconvenience. It is a structural wound with consequences that will echo long after artillery and drones fall silent.

What “closure” means in a frontline university city

In Kharkiv, “closure” rarely means a neat, final decision to cease teaching. It means a layered set of compromises: campuses that cannot safely host students, lecture theatres damaged by strikes, libraries and laboratories disrupted, staff scattered, students displaced, and an educational process pushed into distance formats by security realities rather than pedagogical choice. ZOiS has described Kharkiv’s universities as working “on the front line”, navigating destroyed facilities, strained budgets and the daily management of risk in a city under regular attack. 

Even where buildings still stand, their use can become impossible. Attacks on education facilities across Ukraine have increased markedly, with humanitarian organisations documenting escalating disruption and the resulting reliance on online learning. In Kharkiv region specifically, international agencies have reported widespread damage to educational infrastructure, noting that destruction and damage have made in person learning impossible for many, forcing continued online study. 

This is the physical dimension of closure: the campus as a place that can no longer gather people. But closure also has an administrative dimension. Ukrainian education authorities have periodically recommended extensions of holidays or shifts to distance formats in response to security conditions, signalling that remote teaching is not an exception but an instrument of national crisis management. 

The loss of the “thick” university experience

A university is more than content delivery. It is a social environment where the informal curriculum is as important as the formal one. Students learn how to argue without falling out, how to present an idea, how to collaborate, how to disagree with a supervisor, how to use a laboratory safely, how to run a student society, how to attend a public lecture and then carry its ideas into civic life. When education becomes primarily remote, much of this thick experience thins into a series of video calls and uploaded files.

Kharkiv’s closures therefore produce a quiet, cumulative educational deficit that is not captured by grades. Students may complete modules while missing the apprenticeship element of higher learning. This is especially acute in disciplines where practice is central:

• Engineering and the physical sciences, which depend upon laboratories, workshops, instrumentation and supervised experimentation

  
  

• Medicine and allied health, which depend upon clinical exposure and structured placement

  
  

• The arts, performance and cultural education, which depend on rehearsal spaces, studios and audiences

  
  

• Vocational and further education, which depends on equipment, safety training and hands on competence

In each case online substitutes exist, but they are substitutes. Over time, the labour market notices the difference, not as a moral judgment upon students who have endured war, but as a skills mismatch that employers must bridge.

Inequality, intensified

Closures do not affect all students equally. Distance learning shifts costs and risks onto families. It assumes stable electricity, reliable internet, a quiet space, a workable device, and an adult household that can absorb disruption. In a city and region repeatedly targeted, these assumptions fail more often than policy designers would like.

The result is a war shaped educational inequality with several layers.

First, economic inequality: families with resources can secure better devices, alternative tutoring, safer accommodation and sometimes relocation. Families without resources improvise, and improvised education tends to widen existing gaps.

Secondly, geographic inequality: students displaced internally, or abroad, may continue their studies but at the cost of weakened ties to Kharkiv’s professional networks and civic institutions. Those who remain in the city may face frequent interruptions, stress and limited access to facilities.

Thirdly, psychological inequality: students who have experienced direct trauma or repeated air raids may be less able to concentrate, particularly when studying alone. The institution can offer support services, but closure reduces the likelihood that students will seek help casually or be noticed by staff in the ordinary flow of campus life.

The research pipeline breaks where it is most needed

Kharkiv has historically been a scientific and industrial centre. In wartime, the value of research capacity becomes sharper, not softer. Ukraine needs engineers for repair and reconstruction, scientists for energy resilience and materials, medical research for rehabilitation, and social science for governance and recovery. Yet war conditions erode research in predictable ways: equipment is destroyed or inaccessible, experiments are interrupted, data collection becomes difficult, and staff emigrate or join defence related work.

Studies of academia under wartime conditions have documented declines in output and participation, reflecting how quickly systems of scholarship degrade when routine collapses.  Even when teaching continues online, research often suffers because it depends on physical infrastructure and stable collaboration.

This matters for society because universities are not only teaching shops. They are knowledge production institutions. When the research pipeline breaks, Ukraine becomes more dependent on external expertise precisely when she most needs domestic capacity, local language competence and contextual understanding.

Kharkiv’s civic life is emptied out

A city built around universities has a particular kind of civic density. Students provide footfall for small businesses, cultural venues and public transport. They animate neighbourhoods. They staff part time jobs. They bring ideas into newspapers, theatres, voluntary organisations and municipal debates. Universities also provide civic services: public lectures, clinics, legal aid centres, teacher training programmes, partnerships with local authorities.

When establishments of Higher and Further Education close physically, the city loses this soft infrastructure. Over time, Kharkiv risks a demographic thinning: fewer young adults living in the city, fewer early career professionals staying after graduation, fewer families deciding that Kharkiv is a place where their children can safely build futures. The war already pressures urban confidence. Educational closure magnifies it.

This is not an abstract concern. Reconstruction is not only concrete and steel. It is trust in normal life. In Kharkiv, universities are amongst the most powerful normalising institutions. Their closure therefore has symbolic consequences: it signals that the future has been postponed.

National security has an educational dimension

It can feel odd to speak of higher education in the language of security, yet the war makes the link unavoidable. Ukraine’s resilience depends on trained people: officers and logisticians, drone engineers and software developers, medics and psychologists, builders and surveyors, teachers who can repair learning loss, administrators who can run municipalities in conditions of pressure.

If Kharkiv’s institutions are physically closed for long periods, Ukraine loses some throughput in these human capabilities. Even if degrees are awarded, the training may be narrower. The country then pays twice: once in the reduced competence of a graduating cohort and again in the cost of remedial training within employers, public services and the armed forces.

Meanwhile Russia benefits strategically from educational disruption without needing to occupy territory. It is a form of long war pressure: degrading human capital, encouraging emigration and exhausting institutional capacity. Reports documenting the scale of attacks on education across Ukraine underline that this is a national pattern, not a local inconvenience. 

What can be done, and what cannot

Some adaptation is already visible. Repair projects in Kharkiv region show that international support can restore educational facilities where security conditions allow, particularly when paired with protective measures. For schools Kharkiv has also pioneered underground solutions in some settings, demonstrating that education can be relocated into safer spaces when investment and engineering permit. The higher and further education sector can learn from this spirit, while recognising the different requirements of laboratories, studios and vocational workshops.

But it is important to be honest. No educational policy can fully compensate for a security environment in which gathering is dangerous. The best strategies are therefore those that treat closure as a social crisis, not merely a technical shift.

Priorities that follow from that framing include:

• Protected learning spaces where feasible, including hardened facilities for practical instruction, assessment and critical laboratory work

  
  

• Mental health support designed for remote conditions, with proactive outreach rather than passive availability

  
  

• Targeted support for disadvantaged students, including device provision, connectivity support and flexible scheduling for those living with blackouts and repeated alarms

  
  

• Partnerships with employers and municipalities to create supervised, local practical placements for vocational and technical students when campuses cannot host them

  
  

• International research partnerships that keep Kharkiv scholars connected, funded and publishing, so that the city’s intellectual capital is not permanently drained

The long view

Kharkiv’s closures are a reminder that war wages itself not only on the front line but in the slow erosion of institutions that carry a society from one generation to the next. If Ukraine is to emerge from this war with her sovereignty intact and her democracy strengthened, she will need the habits and capacities that universities cultivate: critical thinking, professional ethics, technical competence, and the confidence to imagine futures.

When Kharkiv’s lecture halls go dark, it is not merely a local tragedy. It is a national risk and a European concern. The task is not simply to keep classes running online. It is to preserve, as far as possible, the social function of higher and further education in a city that has always been one of Ukraine’s intellectual engines.

Ukraine has already shown that she can adapt under fire. The question now is whether her partners can match that endurance with investment that treats education as part of defence, recovery and the moral architecture of a free society.