In a town called Staryi Saltiv, in northeastern Ukraine, many buildings lie in ruins after years of war, but only one has been demolished twice: the district school. Russian missiles leveled it in early 2022. The town gradually raised the money not just to reconstruct it but to enlarge and improve it, adding new facilities for disabled children. Then, just days after the work was completed in early May, the Russians sent five Shahed drones into it, leaving it a burned-out ruin.

“We don’t know why,” Iryna Glazunova, the town’s director of education and culture, told me. “I think the overall point is to destroy Ukraine.”

Now an enormous, colorful banner draped over the wreckage reads WE WILL CONTINUE ANYWAY.

They will continue in a reinforced-concrete bunker three stories underground, where Staryi Saltiv is digging its new school out of the earth. Similar schools are under construction across eastern Ukraine. Kharkiv, the largest city in the northeast, has seven major subterranean schools, and more are being built; the resources being poured into this effort testify to the grim expectation that such facilities will be in use for many years.

Visiting them is an eerie experience: Aboveground, schoolyards and jungle gyms are empty and silent. Only when you descend two or three stories into the bunker do you hear the familiar shrieks and laughter of children.

Jedrzej Nowicki for The Atlantic A school lies in ruins in the village of Zalyman, Kharkiv region, Ukraine.

Russian drones have made a clear sky into a source of terror for Ukrainian young people. Most have taken instruction only by Zoom since the full-scale Russian invasion began, in 2022. They study in apartments they share with their parents, with frequent interruptions, such as when the power goes out or when the air-raid sirens send them fleeing to shelters. Many are so isolated and anxious that they are unable to imagine a future.

The plight of Ukraine’s young people is a direct consequence of Russia’s effort to eradicate their national identity. In a little less than four years, Russia has damaged or destroyed some 3,500 schools in an apparent campaign to demoralize the population and pave the way for its Russification. The onslaught has also reduced churches and town halls across northeastern Ukraine to rubble, and with them, much of the physical and mental infrastructure of life for the country’s youth.

Read: Bakhmut, before it vanished

When I visited the Kharkiv region this summer, I heard from administrators, teachers, and military officers in town after town that the isolation of Ukrainian children presents an existential threat to the country’s future. To confront it, community members are building new institutions underground and improvising new forms of social life.

Young people now spend much of their life in a subterranean world of schools, recreation centers, shelters, even malls.