The University Without a City: An Interview with Professor Olena Khadzhynova
How a technical university from occupied Mariupol survived the destruction of its campus, rebuilt itself in Dnipro and is now contemplating an entirely different future
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 28 October 2026
There are universities whose identities are inseparable from their cities. Pryazovskyi State Technical University was one of them. Founded in Mariupol and developed over generations in intimate association with the city’s metallurgical plants, heavy industry, port and engineering economy, it was not merely an educational institution situated in Mariupol. It was part of the intellectual infrastructure of the city itself.
Then came 24 February 2022. Within weeks, Mariupol was being destroyed and occupied. The university lost its campus, laboratories, library, archives, museum and much of the physical infrastructure accumulated over decades. Its lecturers and students were scattered across Ukraine, occupied territory, Russia and Europe. Some were killed. Others disappeared from the university community altogether.
Yet the university survived.
It now operates from Dnipro, principally through a combination of online education, borrowed and newly created laboratories, cooperation with Dnipro University of Technology and an extraordinary exercise in institutional improvisation. Its students are dispersed across Ukraine and abroad, and some continue to study secretly from Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. Its lecturers likewise live across several countries. The institution exists simultaneously in Dnipro and across a network of computers, telephones, laboratories and displaced human relationships.
On 28 October 2026, I met Professor Olena Viktorivna Khadzhynova, Rector of Pryazovskyi State Technical University, at the university’s present home in Dnipro. Professor Khadzhynova is an economist by training. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion she was Director of the university’s Educational and Scientific Institute of Economics and Management, a position roughly equivalent to Dean of a Faculty. She escaped Mariupol on 5 March 2022 and became one of the people instrumental in finding the university’s scattered staff and students and reconstructing the institution in exile.
Before our interview she prepared detailed written responses to my questions. We then discussed the same subjects in person for almost an hour. The interview below combines those written answers with our conversation, retaining the additional details and personal reflections that emerged as we spoke.
What follows is an unusual account of institutional survival. It is also a story about what a university actually is once its buildings have been taken away. The interview was undertaken in English and in Russian and has been lightly edited for clarity.
-
Matthew Parish: You personally survived the siege of Mariupol and managed to leave the city in March 2022. If you are comfortable discussing it, what do you remember about the final days of the university’s operations in Mariupol, and how did you make the decision to begin rebuilding it in Dnipro?
Professor Olena Khadzhynova: At the beginning of the war I was Director of the Educational and Scientific Institute of Economics and Management. My responsibilities were therefore limited to managing my own institute.
On the morning of 24 February, before the working day had begun, there was no clear communication or instruction either from the city authorities or from the university leadership. I decided that all our employees should remain at home, that the students should remain at home and that teaching should move online. I nevertheless went to the university myself.
The university was empty. Everything was closed and there were virtually no people there apart from some administrative personnel who had come to collect documents.
I remember standing in our Digital Economy Laboratory, which we had opened only on 15 February, just days before the invasion. It contained powerful new equipment. I looked at all these resources and simply did not know what to do. Should I take something with me? What could I fit into my car? Should I take equipment to my apartment? Would it be safer in my apartment or in the university under guard?
There were no answers. Our databases were on servers to which I did not have access. Physically, there was very little that I could take. So I left everything there.
In fact, after going to work on 24 February, I never returned to my apartment. There was fighting and intensive Russian bombardment in the area where I lived.
By the beginning of March, Mariupol had lost electricity, communications and internet access. People were completely isolated. Nobody could reliably establish whether humanitarian corridors existed, where buses might be leaving from or whether a particular road was safe. There was no organised evacuation that could be depended upon. People acted according to their own judgement and at their own risk.
In war, sometimes the only things that can save you are intuition and the instinct for self-preservation.
On 5 March, quite by chance, a boy I encountered told me that a column was supposedly forming to leave the city and that a humanitarian corridor might open. I left with my family in our own vehicle. About 500 metres beyond the boundary of Mariupol there were already Russian checkpoints. Between Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia we encountered perhaps ten of them.
The journey was extremely difficult. At one point my family was separated because Russian soldiers would not allow my husband to proceed and he had to remain behind, as happened to many men on that road. The whole journey was like the plot of a Hollywood film, except that it was real: each time you overcame one danger, another appeared.
Late on 5 March I reached Dnipro.
At that moment very few people from our university had reached Ukrainian-controlled territory. Almost everyone was still in Mariupol. So I began sending messages to every contact I possessed: I am in Dnipro. Please respond.
I wrote to every telephone number, messenger account and email address I had. Initially there were virtually no replies. Then, around 15, 16, 17 and 18 March, as larger numbers of people began escaping Mariupol, they received the messages and started responding.
That was how an initiative group emerged. There was no administrative command behind it. There were no orders from senior management. The Ministry could not communicate with us and the Rector and Vice-Rectors were themselves still in Mariupol.
We created a Viber group and began finding people through one another. We had no single database containing the telephone numbers or addresses of all university employees. I knew the people from my faculty, another colleague knew people from the transport faculty and each person added everybody they knew.
Then we created Google forms for employees and students. As people reached Ukrainian-controlled territory, foreign countries or, in some cases, had been deported to Russia, they found us and registered.
That is how we assembled the university again.
The decision to rebuild in Dnipro was not really the result of a long strategic debate. It was the only way of preserving what generations of people had created. When you emerge from hell, you understand very clearly the value of two things: human lives and a shared mission.
A university is not its walls or its buildings, however much we may love them. It is its people, its lecturers, its students and its intellectual potential.
Matthew Parish: Once you had escaped, how did you re-establish contact with lecturers and students, restart teaching and preserve the university as a coherent academic community? What were the greatest difficulties?
Professor Khadzhynova: Finding our people was the first and most important task.
We had no access to servers, databases or paper archives. There was no reliable central list of contacts available to us. So human initiative became our principal instrument of institutional survival.
We found people through chains of acquaintances. Every new name appearing in the Viber group was a small victory because it meant that another person was alive.
The most serious problem was uncertainty. Students and colleagues sometimes remained for weeks in occupied Mariupol or travelling without communications. We simply did not know what had happened to them.
The second problem was the complete absence of a technical and material base. We did not start from zero; we started from below zero. Many lecturers did not even have laptops or computers. Sometimes all a person possessed was a smartphone, and that was what they initially used to work.
The third problem was psychological exhaustion. We were not merely trying to restart an educational process. We needed to create a point of stability for people whose lives had collapsed.
It was ultimately the community itself, and people’s capacity for self-organisation, that allowed us to rebuild the university in Dnipro.
Matthew Parish: How does Pryazovskyi State Technical University today differ from the institution it was before February 2022? What survived, what was irretrievably lost and what new opportunities emerged?
Professor Khadzhynova: Before the full-scale invasion we were a classical campus university with a very substantial physical and technical base. We had laboratories and were deeply embedded in the industrial landscape of Mariupol.
Today we are something completely different: a flexible, relocated, digital and extraordinarily adaptive higher education institution. Our existence demonstrates that the strength of a university is not ultimately contained in bricks or equipment. It lies in people, knowledge and values.
What have we irretrievably lost? First of all, people. Some members of our university community were killed. Others remained in occupied territory and did not rejoin us. People are our greatest loss.
We also lost our historical campus and material infrastructure. Buildings, laboratories, scientific archives, our museum, library and equipment accumulated over decades remained in occupied and devastated Mariupol. Nothing was evacuated.
We also lost the ordinary physical rhythm of university life: daily face-to-face conversations, student events and immediate contact with the industrial enterprises around us.
But we preserved our academic core and scientific potential. We retained our principal academic schools and educational programmes, and we are now adding new human capital: postgraduate students, lecturers and researchers whom we have found in Dnipro, elsewhere in Ukraine and even abroad.
Most importantly, we retained the trust of our students.
I remember one applicant in 2022 telling me that he had previously intended to study in Kyiv but had changed his mind. He said: “I choose our university because it is my connection with Mariupol. I want to remain loyal to Mariupol. I will study with you.”
Those words meant an enormous amount to me.
We have also gained something through adversity. We have undergone an enormous digital transformation. International cooperation has expanded dramatically, and our relocation has created new relationships with Dnipro’s universities, businesses and industrial community.
We have also developed a different culture of leadership: more resilient, more human-centred and more conscious of trauma.
Matthew Parish: Published figures suggested approximately 2,400 students in late 2022, whereas subsequent official statistics indicated 984. Are those figures directly comparable? How many students are actually studying with you now?
Professor Khadzhynova: They are not directly comparable.
The figure from 2022 was essentially an initial record of everybody who appeared on the university’s lists at the beginning of the full-scale invasion and during the first months after we resumed operations.
The present figure represents verified active students: people actually participating in education, taking examinations and completing their studies. Today we have approximately 1,300 students.
There are several reasons for the reduction. A substantial number of students simply graduated during those years. Others left Ukraine with their families and entered foreign universities. Some were lost to us because of prolonged occupation or displacement. Some had to abandon or interrupt education because they needed full-time employment to support families that had lost everything.
We must also remember that we were historically a regional university. Our natural recruitment area was Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast and neighbouring communities. Even before 2022, the geography of the conflict had restricted our potential recruitment base.
Now our Mariupol community is dispersed throughout Ukraine and abroad. It is natural that young people may choose universities close to where their families currently live.
And Dnipro itself is a very competitive university city. It already has large, established institutions with campuses, laboratories, strong reputations and local recruitment networks. A relocated university without an equivalent physical infrastructure faces an enormous challenge.
Nevertheless, we chose Dnipro deliberately. It resembles us in spirit, mentality and industrial profile. We believed our knowledge and experience could find practical applications here.
There is another difficulty: uncertainty about the future of relocated universities. The Ministry is considering optimisation, consolidation and mergers within higher education. A prospective student naturally wants stability. If the future institutional status of a university appears uncertain, that inevitably affects recruitment.
The composition of our student body is changing as well. We increasingly have mature and highly motivated students, people undertaking second degrees and postgraduate students who deliberately choose our engineering, technical and economic specialisms. Many are children of people from Mariupol or displaced families from Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia for whom the university remains a symbolic connection with home.
Matthew Parish: How much of the university now operates physically in Dnipro and how much remotely? Do you envisage returning to substantially face-to-face education?
Professor Khadzhynova: We operate a hybrid system, but online education predominates substantially.
There are two principal reasons: safety and geography.
Our students are dispersed across Ukraine, abroad and, in some cases, in temporarily occupied territories. There is not currently a single complete academic group whose members are all physically present in Dnipro.
In those circumstances online teaching is the only objectively fair solution. It allows every student access to education regardless of where he or she happens to be.
Some of our academic staff are in Dnipro. Our front office and the services supporting the educational process are here. We organise face-to-face practical sessions and meetings wherever possible, but lectures are conducted online.
Remote education is therefore not merely a technological preference. It is what keeps geographically dispersed academic groups together.
Matthew Parish: But this is a technical university. How can you maintain proper education in engineering, metallurgy and subjects requiring laboratories and physical experimentation without the infrastructure you possessed in Mariupol?
Professor Khadzhynova: We make extensive use of the modern technical facilities of Dnipro University of Technology, where we are presently based, and we have also established several laboratories of our own.
Laboratory work can be transmitted live. In some cases students have remote access to equipment. Lecturers and laboratory engineers conduct physical experiments and measurements while students elsewhere participate through digital systems, record measurements and analyse the resulting data.
Obviously, some disciplines lend themselves to this more readily than others. It is comparatively straightforward for information technology and computer engineering. Energy and electrical engineering can also make substantial use of virtual machines and remote systems.
Where genuine physical experimentation is required, laboratory staff here conduct the work with students participating through live transmission. We record those sessions and make them available through Google Classroom and Moodle because students may miss a live class as a result of poor communications, air raids or other wartime circumstances.
We also use industrial placements. Students may undertake practical training at enterprises in the cities or communities where they currently live.
Students remaining in occupied territories present a much harder problem because naturally we cannot recognise practical work undertaken within the structures of occupation. For them we try to provide as much practical education as possible through virtual laboratories.
We also operate dual education programmes, combining university theory with practical employment or training in companies. I would like to expand those programmes considerably.
Matthew Parish: How is the university financed? Is the money available sufficient for long-term survival rather than merely keeping the institution functioning?
Professor Khadzhynova: We receive state funding and we also actively raise resources ourselves. These include tuition from contract students, commissioned research for businesses and the commercialisation of our research and development.
International foundations and partner universities also provide support.
With assistance from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, international organisations and foreign partners, we have managed to create a genuinely good technical infrastructure for online education. That has allowed us to preserve educational quality under extremely difficult circumstances.
But we should be candid: the resources are sufficient for current operations and high-quality online education. They are categorically insufficient to create a complete modern university campus with laboratories, underground shelters, student accommodation and safe infrastructure for substantial face-to-face education.
We cannot solve that problem from our own resources.
Matthew Parish: Have you managed to retain the core of your academic staff?
Professor Khadzhynova: Yes, we have retained the basic core, and that is what allows us to maintain the quality of our programmes. But we have suffered substantial losses, particularly among specialists in technical subjects.
Some colleagues remained in occupied Mariupol. There were even people who initially escaped to Ukrainian-controlled territory, Russia or other countries and later returned to Mariupol.
The principal reason was extremely pragmatic: housing.
The occupation authorities in Mariupol offered housing in an attempt to attract personnel, particularly teachers and university lecturers. As a relocated university, unfortunately we do not possess the resources to provide this most basic human requirement, a roof over people’s heads.
Our lecturers face unstable living conditions, high rents and salaries that barely cover basic living expenses. They must teach online around electricity cuts and air-raid warnings while continuing their scientific work. The psychological strain is substantial.
But perhaps our greatest enemy is time.
The longer our colleagues live elsewhere in Ukraine or abroad, the more deeply they become integrated into those communities. They find employment. Their children enter schools. Their families establish lives.
Eventually they may no longer be willing to uproot themselves again and return to us.
If we want them to return, people need two things: safety and meaning. Housing is part of that. We must create somewhere safe where there is a reason to come back.
So preserving an academic community is not merely a matter of paying salaries. It is a constant struggle to preserve meaning, values and a sense of belonging: somewhere to return to and people to return to.
Matthew Parish: What has displacement done to your students psychologically?
Professor Khadzhynova: It was a colossal shock: the loss of their familiar world.
I remember April and May 2022 when, despite everything, we resumed classes. Students joined the first online lessons and cried because of the stress and pain they had experienced.
But they also thanked us sincerely for restarting the university. It had returned to them a small island of normal life, a point of stability and a connection with home.
From our first days in Dnipro we tried to care for students and staff. Dnipro University of Technology provided accommodation. We obtained grants to renovate and equip rooms for internally displaced students and employees.
We also give students opportunities to work within the university, providing both professional experience and some financial support.
We understand that many of our students have experienced war, evacuation, bereavement and other forms of trauma. We are therefore implementing an Erasmus+ project on trauma-informed education. We train lecturers to create psychologically safe environments and to exercise empathy and flexibility without sacrificing educational standards.
We are not doctors and we do not attempt to diagnose people. We ourselves have been traumatised as well.
For us, caring for students is not simply a social function. It is fundamental to institutional resilience and human responsibility.
Matthew Parish: Can you admit students who remain in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory?
Professor Khadzhynova: Yes. We have both the right and the ability to admit applicants from temporarily occupied territories.
For us this is not merely an administrative procedure. It is a mission: a struggle for our young people and for their connection with Ukraine and Ukrainian education.
The greatest problem is their safety. Nobody around an applicant in occupied territory should necessarily know that he or she is applying to a Ukrainian university. Even Ukrainian speech can create danger.
We have had situations during online lectures in which somebody entered the room where a student was studying and said: “Turn it off. Turn off the Ukrainian language.”
Applicants also face blocked Ukrainian websites, information barriers and difficulties with Ukrainian educational documents and examinations.
We therefore guide these applicants personally through the process. We do not simply give them instructions and tell them what to do. We accompany them through every stage.
Communications are confidential and conducted through protected channels. Admission procedures can be adapted and conducted remotely, including simplified procedures where the ordinary Ukrainian examination or documentation route is unavailable.
But again, time is our enemy.
The longer occupation continues, the more children are subjected to another information environment, propaganda and different educational standards. They finish local schools and gradually become accustomed to the realities surrounding them.
With every year, their connection with Ukraine becomes thinner. Their parents may understandably become less willing to accept the risk involved in contacting a Ukrainian university.
We must look at this truth directly: with every month that passes, the probability that some of these young people will choose a Ukrainian university diminishes.
So the struggle for each applicant from occupied territory is not about meeting our recruitment target.
It is a battle for minds, identity and the future of the country. We must offer these young people an alternative, hope and the safest possible route into Ukrainian education.
Matthew Parish: Who has helped you internationally?
Professor Khadzhynova: International support has been enormously important.
In 2022, USAID, the British Council, Nova Ukraine, the Renaissance Foundation and other organisations provided practical assistance.
USAID’s Economic Resilience Activity in eastern Ukraine provided humanitarian assistance worth more than 2.1 million hryvnias. That allowed us to acquire laptops, Starlink equipment, multifunction devices, an interactive panel, a projector and other equipment. Without donor support we could not have supplied our lecturers with the technology necessary to resume teaching.
Nova Ukraine helped equip accommodation for displaced staff and students with refrigerators, washing machines, microwave ovens, boilers, beds, furniture and basic household necessities. The Renaissance Foundation also supported living conditions in the accommodation provided through Dnipro University of Technology.
The British Council helped equip a shelter in the building where our university is located, including generators, furniture, drinking-water and fuel containers, sanitary equipment and medical supplies.
Our institutional partners include universities and research institutions in Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Slovenia, Latvia, Slovakia and Greece. Through Erasmus+ and other programmes, students and staff undertake exchanges, training and professional development. We participate in joint research and technology transfer.
International assistance is therefore not simply money and equipment. It also means access to European experience in university management, crisis management and institutional development.
These relationships allow us not merely to survive relocation but progressively to integrate into the European educational and scientific community.
Matthew Parish: You have established a Centre for Innovative Educational Technologies and Digital Research. What roles do digital education, artificial intelligence and remote laboratories play in the university’s strategy?
Professor Khadzhynova: The Centre is not simply another development project. For a relocated university, digital transformation is fundamental to survival and future development.
It is the bridge that allows us to preserve educational quality while students and lecturers are dispersed throughout Ukraine and the world.
The Centre was established with financial support from the Ministry of Education and Science. It enables us to develop remote and virtual laboratories, real-time access to systems, modelling and other forms of digital practical education.
We are also actively introducing artificial intelligence into education, including individual educational pathways, scientific research and university management.
The Centre is new, so I would not yet claim major commercial results from it. We are developing proposals for business and involving postgraduate and undergraduate students in research.
But it already supports major international grant projects. These include TWINTECH, involving digital twin technologies, and HEI-TRAIN, concerned with the integration of artificial intelligence into university management and digital research.
For us, digitalisation is no longer an optional supplement to conventional university education. It is part of the institutional architecture that makes our continued existence possible.
Matthew Parish: Your university once had intimate relationships with Mariupol’s industrial economy. Have you been able to replace those relationships with employers and businesses in Dnipro?
Professor Khadzhynova: We have established genuine partnerships with employers and enterprises in Dnipro. These are not simply memoranda or cooperation agreements on paper. They involve dual education, scientific and technical work and practical cooperation.
Nevertheless, relocation forced us to rethink our scientific paradigm.
Historically, our expertise was centred upon large-scale metallurgy, heavy engineering and the port economy of Mariupol. Much of that industrial world has either been destroyed, occupied or fundamentally altered.
We therefore had to reconsider where our knowledge could be applied.
Our IT specialists and researchers now offer businesses solutions involving digitalisation of business processes, automated management, data analysis and modelling of production systems. We have shifted emphasis towards automation, digitalisation, resource optimisation and artificial intelligence.
That transformation has also created new opportunities for student placements and dual education in Dnipro’s industrial and technological sectors.
So we have not simply attempted to reproduce Mariupol in Dnipro. We have had to transform the scientific knowledge we brought with us.
Matthew Parish: Mariupol was historically a linguistically and culturally complex city. How have the events since 2022 affected your students’ understanding of Ukrainian identity?
Professor Khadzhynova: The events of 2022, the tragedy of Mariupol and our forced relocation produced profound changes both in the university’s academic culture and in our students’ self-understanding.
Before 2022, Ukrainian civic identity was for many people something natural and almost taken for granted. After what happened, it became a conscious choice, something for which people understood they had to struggle.
Students developed a much deeper appreciation of Ukrainian statehood, culture and language. There was a natural transition towards Ukrainian in education and communication, together with greater interest in Ukrainian history and in understanding the place of Mariupol and our region within the country.
Ukrainian became more than the official language of lectures. It became a language of solidarity, psychological support and unity.
At the same time, we do not react aggressively when somebody speaks Russian. Teaching is in Ukrainian, but if somebody switches to Russian in conversation, our community does not condemn that person.
Our Mariupol identity is also something we preserve. For us that means resilience, hard work, openness, freedom and the memory of our colleagues and students who died. We are documenting the history of the university, the city and the tragedy of the war.
Academic freedom and horizontal relationships have also become increasingly important. Once you lose the physical walls of a university, you understand more clearly that a university consists of people and their freedom of thought.
Matthew Parish: The university has participated in planning for the eventual reconstruction of Mariupol. What role could it play if the city is liberated?
Professor Khadzhynova: Participation in the future reconstruction of Mariupol is not simply another university project. For many of us it is part of our institutional mission.
We have participated in the Mariupol Reborn initiative since 2022. Our academics have contributed ideas concerning industrial reconstruction, a new technological economy and the design of a different kind of city.
I do not regret a single hour our colleagues have spent on this work, even though the passage of time makes some of us increasingly conscious that perhaps we will not return to Mariupol in the way we once imagined.
If reconstruction becomes possible, we do not believe Mariupol should simply reproduce the industrial model of the past. It should become a modern, environmentally responsible and technologically advanced European city.
Our researchers are working on automation, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, energy efficiency, digital twins, green economic development and Smart City concepts.
But perhaps our most important contribution would be people.
A liberated city would suffer an enormous shortage of qualified specialists. We can educate engineers, IT specialists, specialists in energy, automation and robotics, economists, financial professionals and managers.
Whether we eventually return or remain elsewhere, that human capital is something we can contribute to Mariupol’s future.
Matthew Parish: But what if you cannot return? What if Mariupol remains inaccessible for many years?
Professor Khadzhynova: We are realistic. We do not exclude that possibility.
The university cannot simply sit and wait passively. If returning to Mariupol is delayed for many years, we need an entirely new model.
Our lecturers and researchers are already working on one idea. It involves building a new modern settlement or innovative urban district centred upon the university and the displaced Mariupol community.
There is a project, preliminary documentation and land identified between Kyiv and Zhytomyr. We think of it as a Mariupol Quarter.
The underlying idea is that the university could become one of the centres of a new community. Housing is fundamental. If we had housing, we could bring together members of our academic community who are scattered across Ukraine and Europe, attract new specialists and create an ecosystem involving laboratories, start-ups, schools and a modern living environment.
How do you bring Mariupol people together again? You have to give them what I mentioned earlier: safety and meaning.
Of course the obstacle is investment. A project of this scale cannot realistically be financed from Ukraine’s state budget under present circumstances. It would require international partners, European reconstruction funds and major investors willing to invest in an educational and technological cluster.
If history has temporarily deprived us of our home in Mariupol, our task cannot simply be to wait.
We have to build something new.
Matthew Parish: Finally, what concrete assistance would you like British, European and other foreign universities, research institutions and charitable organisations to provide? What message would you give to the international academic community?
Professor Khadzhynova: I want to emphasise that we are not looking for passive charity. We are looking for genuine, equal partnership.
Ukrainian universities have survived and learned to operate under circumstances that European universities have never encountered. We bring to international cooperation unique experience in crisis management, extraordinary flexibility, technological adaptability and academic resilience.
We critically need investment in innovative and protected infrastructure: modern research hubs, digital laboratories, a university campus and housing that would allow us to keep academic communities physically within Ukraine and encourage researchers to return from abroad.
We also want direct institutional partnerships. We want foreign universities to include us as genuine partners in major research consortia under programmes such as Horizon Europe and Erasmus+.
We are interested in joint work in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, energy, bioengineering and green technologies.
Academic mobility and double-degree programmes are also extremely important, but they should operate according to a principle of mobility without brain drain. Students and researchers should gain the benefits of European experience while retaining their relationship with their Ukrainian university and contributing that experience to Ukraine.
My principal message to the international academic community is simple.
Ukrainian higher education is not merely a victim of war requiring sympathy. It is on the front line in the defence of free European science and democratic values.
Investment in Ukrainian universities is an investment in security, innovation and the future of Europe.
We have demonstrated that we can preserve educational quality despite missiles, bombs, displacement and deprivation. But we do not merely want to survive.
We want to transform ourselves, rebuild our country through advanced technology and become strong and equal partners in the global scientific community.
-
When our conversation ended, I was struck by an apparent paradox. Pryazovskyi State Technical University has lost almost everything traditionally thought necessary to make a university tangible. Its historical campus is inaccessible. Its laboratories and archives were left behind. Its lecturers and students are distributed across cities and countries, and some of its students participate from occupied territory under circumstances in which even the sound of a Ukrainian-language lecture may present a danger.
Yet the institution continues to teach.
There is something philosophically revealing about this. Universities are frequently identified with their architecture: ancient quadrangles, libraries, laboratories, lecture theatres and the physical rituals of academic life. Pryazovskyi State Technical University has been subjected to an involuntary experiment in removing almost all of those things. What remained was a network of human beings who decided that they were still a university.
The practical consequences should not be romanticised. Professor Khadzhynova repeatedly returned to housing, laboratories, money, security and the attrition produced by time. Digital technology can preserve a lecture but it cannot provide a displaced professor with an apartment. An online laboratory may provide remarkable educational opportunities but it cannot entirely reproduce physical immersion in an engineering environment. A Viber group can reconstruct a community after catastrophe, but every additional year of geographical dispersal makes that community harder to preserve.
The most disturbing part of our conversation concerned students in occupied territory. Here the university is engaged in something much larger than recruitment. A young person secretly listening to a Ukrainian university lecture in occupied Mariupol is maintaining an intellectual relationship with a country from which he or she has been physically separated. As Professor Khadzhynova put it, this is increasingly a “battle for minds, identity and the future of the country”.
There was also an intriguing refusal to remain trapped by nostalgia. Professor Khadzhynova plainly wants Mariupol eventually to be liberated and rebuilt, and the university has invested considerable intellectual effort in thinking about what a reconstructed city might become. Yet she is sufficiently pragmatic to contemplate the possibility that her university may never return, or at least not within a period that permits an institution simply to wait.
Hence the remarkable idea of a new Mariupol community elsewhere in Ukraine, with a university at its centre. Whether the necessary billions of hryvnias and international investment can ever be assembled is another matter. Yet the idea reveals something about the institution’s conception of itself. It no longer understands its task merely as preserving an administrative entity until history permits a return home. It is considering whether a university displaced from its city might eventually help create a new city around itself.
Professor Khadzhynova ended our conversation by rejecting the language of passive charity. That distinction is important. Ukraine’s displaced universities undoubtedly need money, equipment and physical infrastructure. Yet they have also accumulated forms of institutional knowledge that universities elsewhere fortunately have never needed to acquire: how to continue teaching after losing a campus, how to reconstruct an academic community from scattered telephone contacts, how to conduct engineering education across continents and how to preserve a relationship with students living under military occupation.
Pryazovskyi State Technical University therefore presents the international academic community with a proposition rather more interesting than a request for assistance. It asks whether an institution born from the industrial economy of twentieth-century Mariupol can use the catastrophe of its displacement to reinvent itself as a digital, internationally connected and technologically oriented Ukrainian university for the twenty-first century.
Nobody yet knows whether that experiment will succeed. Student numbers have fallen, the physical infrastructure remains inadequate and time steadily encourages displaced academics to establish permanent lives elsewhere. These are formidable problems and Professor Khadzhynova does not disguise them.
Nevertheless, after almost an hour speaking with her in Dnipro, one fact seemed difficult to dispute. The university that Russian forces succeeded in removing from Mariupol has not disappeared.
It has simply become much harder to say where, precisely, the university is.
