BUCHA, Ukraine — From her wooden schoolroom seat, Katya, 15, carefully eyes the assault rifles laid across the desks up front.
Her mind flashes to the Russian checkpoint four years ago.
She is crammed in the back of a neighbor’s car clutching her aunt’s cat as fear rises to her throat. Russian soldiers are pressed up against the car window, seething with anger, fingers on the triggers of their black guns.
The teacher’s voice snaps her back to the present.
“God willing, none of you will ever need the knowledge you gain here, not even once. But if, God forbid, it happens that you do need it — that you cross paths with these situations — it’s better that you know what needs to be done at any given moment,” he says. “Understood?”
Katya nods. She looks again at the training guns. She isn’t scared anymore. Scared is for 11-year-old Katya in the back seat of that car. Scared is for the little girl trembling in the basement, whose mother covered her with her body while Russian war planes circled overhead.
If Russian troops ever return to Bucha, Katya doesn’t want to be scared. She intends to be ready.
The teacher asks for volunteers to try loading a rifle. Katya’s hand shoots up.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion enters its fifth year Tuesday, Ukrainians are yearning for peace but also readying a new generation of defenders — a somber recognition that the Kremlin is still bombing civilians every night and pushing maximalist demands at the negotiating table. The war could go on for years, and even if a ceasefire is achieved, the Russian threat will live next door.
Katya and her classmates have come of age during wartime.
In 2022, as tweens, they survived Russian occupation, made harrowing escapes from the front lines and returned to find the bloodstained suburb of Bucha forever changed by the Russian massacre that unfolded on its streets in the first weeks of the war.
Now 15 and 16, they are still too young to enlist to fight but old enough to understand they soon may be called upon to join their parents and older siblings in protecting their country from a nuclear-armed neighbor intent on denying them an independent future.
While the United States escalates pressure on Kyiv to agree to a negotiated settlement, Ukraine is insisting on ironclad security guarantees — while preparing society to defend itself long term. That includes intensifying efforts to train its children on wartime readiness.
In classrooms across Ukraine, more than 385,000 teenagers are enrolled in a revamped, mandatory course on handling weapons, battlefield tactics, emergency medicine, mine safety, radio communication and how to respond to attacks on energy infrastructure.
The course, called Protecting Ukraine, replaced a decades-old program that taught high-schoolers some basic weapons awareness but was largely a relic of the Soviet era that also involved dry lectures on military hierarchy and learning to march.
That curriculum was developed long before school hallways were adorned with photos of students and teachers killed by Russia, before air alerts sent children scrambling into basements, before sandbags lined school windows to protect them from blasts or classes were held in subways.
Ukraine’s Education Ministry invested $2.3 million in training teachers on the Protecting Ukraine program last year. “Our task was to form a defense mentality,” Education Minister Oksen Lisovyi said. “The need appeared, first of all of course, because of the military confrontation, terrorist threats and because Russia systematically terrorizes the civilian population.”
Students learn “how to protect one’s self, how to protect those who are close to you, how the Ukrainian army works, which role you could find for yourself if you’d choose to take that path,” Lisovyi said. “But first of all, of course, it’s about the preparation of the civilian population.”
Rifles, tourniquets and CPR
Most students in Katya’s classroom were in or near Bucha when Russian forces rampaged the Kyiv region in 2022, executing civilians before retreating from their failed campaign to seize the capital.
When the instructor tells the students just how quickly a green, or safe, zone can turn red, they know exactly what he means.
Katya shivered in a basement, replaying the happiest moments of her life as explosions shook her neighborhood.
Zhenya walked miles along the railway tracks to reach Ukrainian-controlled territory as Russian warplanes circled overhead.
A shell struck the eighth floor of Kyrylo’s apartment building but didn’t explode.
Vasylisa remembers fleeing her hometown in the eastern Donetsk region as a toddler, only to resettle outside Kyiv and watch the sky turn red as streets burned in 2022.
The instructor runs through the basics of trauma medicine: different kinds of tourniquets, how to put pressure on a major wound. He describes types of land mines, explains why radios are still used in an age of phones. He asks for volunteers for a CPR lesson. Katya and Vasylisa step to the front of the room. They giggle as Vasylisa lies down and Katya tips her chin back, opens her mouth, checking for obstruction.
The students tie tourniquets to one another’s arms and practice twisting until they’re so tight they hurt. They remind each other to write down the time. They know that a tourniquet left on too long can lead to amputation.
When they go to load rifles, Katya is confident. She shows the other girls how it’s done while a group of boys plays with their phones in the back. Other students race to see who can load bullets into a magazine fastest.
“I’m going to be dreaming about this already,” Katya says. Her friend Ria chimes in: “Like this, Katya: You wake up and we’re assembling a rifle on your bed!” The girls laugh. Their friend Varvara Koval takes a turn. Katya corrects her approach, takes the magazine and attaches it herself.
The girls know that in schools in Russia, children their age are learning the same techniques. They know those kids are being taught that Ukraine is the aggressor, that Russia is liberating their territory by destroying it. They know that boys just a few years older than their classmates are being fitted for uniforms, crossing the border, killing Ukrainians and dying on Ukrainian land.
“While they are being taught how to properly plant mines, we are being taught how not to step on them,” Katya says of how she pictures Russian students. In a better world, she acknowledged, it would not be normal to load an assault rifle at school or tie a tourniquet on your friend’s arm.
“If no one were attacking our territory, or if Russia followed all the rules and conventions of conducting war, maybe we wouldn’t be learning this,” she adds. “But since they are striking civilian children just like us, we have to know all of this.”
Lost childhood
Katya grew up in this school. Her mom is a teacher here. She knows Bucha like the back of her hand. Vasylisa was never supposed to be here. Born in the eastern Donetsk region, she always dreamed of graduating from the same school as her father. War pushed her family out in 2014. They moved again and again, eventually settling in Irpin, just outside Kyiv.
On Feb. 23, 2022, as Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s borders, Vasylisa’s dad told her and her younger sister, Stasia, to prepare for the worst. Stasia, who was 9, burst out laughing.
The next morning, Russia invaded. Little information trickled in through their unstable internet connection, and what did was terrible: Executions. Whole families shot as they tried to flee. Just across the field from them, they could hear a Ukrainian machine gun picking off Russian troops.
In early March, they fled, packing their dog, guinea pig and several neighbors into their car. The girls thought they were taking a so-called “green corridor” — a safe path toward Kyiv. Their parents knew no such route existed. The trip was a dangerous leap of faith.
Everything seemed to be on fire. They passed the mayor of Irpin hanging out of a car, a rifle in his hands. They eventually made it west, where their dad was quickly drafted to the military. The girls and their mom were stunned.
Back then, Vasylisa thought of the military almost as an extracurricular activity — something to do after school or work. “And now he was taken away, and there was a war,” she said. “I was afraid that … well, I was afraid for Dad. I was crying, talking to him, and he was trying to calm me down, but that only made me cry more.”
Eventually, the family settled into a new rhythm. They returned to the Kyiv region and moved to Bucha, where their dad is now based. Not everything Vasylisa is learning about war in school is new. Her dad taught her and Stasia some field medicine and asked them to always carry tourniquets when they go out. Last summer, they attended a camp where they practiced shooting.
Stasia, at 12, can already assemble and disassemble an AK M-479 in less than a minute.
“I get really upset when I realize that my teenage years are just slipping away like this and passing,” Vasylisa said through tears. “I’m now looking at my sister, who is 12 — the age I was then. And when I realize that she already feels kind of grown up, it makes me sad that I lost some years.”
Their dad has seen Russia’s war come to his family home twice. His daughters, he said, might still be children. But in an emergency, they should be ready to act as adults.
Sounds of war
At school, the military lesson ends in the early afternoon. The class disperses, and the students zip up their backpacks, push past the younger kids through the hallways. Vasylisa goes to an English class. The other girls gather on the steps outside.
The first stop after school is the grocery store for cookies, candies and tea. Varvara’s mom isn’t home from work yet, but she agreed the girls can hang out at their apartment so long as Varvara runs upstairs first to clean.
They kick their shoes off at the door and rush for the kitchen. They boil water. They crowd around the table. They hear an air raid siren and ignore it. They move to Varvara’s room, sit on her bed and floor. They don’t talk about guns or drones or soldiers or war. They talk about boys and girls and crushes and relationships.
They laugh at Varvara’s cat, Masha. Eventually, Ria picks up Varvara’s blue acoustic guitar and starts to strum. The girls quiet down. She begins to sing. They all join in.
When the song ends, they cheer and rush to hug her.
The air alert has stopped. For this moment, safe in Varvara’s room, they are just teenagers. They are young and happy and free. They could almost be anywhere.
But later that night, the sirens blare again. Russian missiles and drones soar overhead and crash into apartments and houses and a hospital and energy infrastructure. Four people are killed. Several children are wounded. Varvara moves from her bed to sleep on a bean bag in the hall. The girls all hope to survive another night, and meet in school again tomorrow.
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