Air raids and ABCs

Eric Moore leads me from the ground floor to the basement, tracing the steps students at Kyiv Christian Academy (KCA) take nearly every day. Each time air raid sirens blare across Ukraine’s capital city, students grab their backpacks, books, laptops, and lunchboxes and head to an underground shelter until officials give the all-clear. The shelter also serves as a classroom so that no matter how long they’re down there, the students can continue to learn. Teachers never know whether the danger will last a few minutes—or several hours.

That’s just one way the realities of war have forced the school to adapt.

But the bomb shelter isn’t just for emergencies. During my visit, on a Friday afternoon in mid-April, a teacher was using the room for a music ensemble rehearsal. On guitars, horns, and keyboards, the student musicians strummed and honked, the tune very much a work in progress. The room bore features of its other use as a Spanish language classroom, with sombreros on the walls and bright-knitted blankets draping the furniture. A few remaining students chatted in the hallway, in both Ukrainian and English.

KCA opened in 1993—just two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-opening of Eastern Europe—as an English-language Christian school for children from missionary families, as well as for Christians from embassies, foreign corporations, and other international groups working in Kyiv. The K-12 school has just 35 students this year, far below the 150 it had before the full-scale war erupted in February 2022. KCA completed that school year, and all of the following one, online, using Google Classroom and other digital tools.

Since then, Moore, the school’s 42-year-old director, and his staff have continued doing their best to educate students amid the challenges brought on by more than three years of a bloody war.

“Of course, we’re praying for safety, praying for peace, all the time,” Moore said.

But the current prospects for peace feel as far away as ever. Steps toward a ceasefire and peace agreement, which dominated news headlines earlier this year, have stalled. On Thursday, missiles smashed Kyiv during the pre-dawn hours, killing 10 and injuring 90. In a blunt message on the online platform, Truth Social, U.S. President Donald Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the strikes. “Vladimir, STOP!” Trump wrote.

Leaders including Trump have qualified Russia’s slowness in addressing peace efforts as foot-dragging, without any apparent effort to end the violence soon. Trump, in a post on social media earlier in April, demanded that “Russia has to get moving” on real peace in Ukraine. Trump and other U.S. officials have also suggested they might abandon American efforts to broker an end to the conflict.

Even small-scale measures, like a 30-day moratorium on strikes against energy infrastructure that expired in mid-April, have been dwarfed by a series of ramped-up, lethal Russian attacks that target people instead of power stations. Ukraine’s civilian deaths and injuries spiked 50 percent in March compared with February, according to recently published United Nations data.

On April 5, a strike on the southern Ukrainian town of Kryvyi Riy landed near a playground, killing nine children and just as many adults. Russia’s Palm Sunday strike on the northeast city of Sumy killed three dozen and wounded more than 100. A later attack on Good Friday, in the eastern city of Kharkiv, killed one and injured more than 120. All of the casualty counts included children. In both the Sumy and Kharkiv events, officials have confirmed Russia’s use of cluster munitions, a controversial type of explosive banned in more than half the world’s countries.

Putin declared a 30-hour ceasefire for the Easter holiday weekend, to which Ukraine agreed. But Ukrainian and Russian authorities both claimed violations along the front. And on Saturday, air raid alerts continued in Ukraine up to the stroke of 6 p.m. local time, when the ceasefire went into force. Air raids resumed minutes after midnight on Easter Sunday, when the ceasefire ended.

As we walked back to Moore’s office, spring sunshine flooded the school’s entrance. Children drifted out toward home. A sign in the lobby read: “Bloom where you are planted.”

In his jeans, stylish boots, and blue hoodie, Moore could pass for one of Kyiv’s many hip, young creative types. Yet three years of war have grayed his hair. Moore’s blue eyes and boyish face belie the fact that he has already served nearly 20 years in Ukraine. He arrived at KCA in 2007 to teach math and science. The intervening years have not erased the slow Midwestern cadence to his words, and Moore explains that he grew up in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. He wears a chunky metal wedding ring like those popular in the United States—but keeps it on his right hand, in the Eastern European way. In 2011 he married Victoria, a Kyiv native who also works at KCA. The couple’s two boys attend the school and take refuge with the other students when alarms ring out.

The Moores could have left Ukraine, like so many have. But they chose to stay.

“There have always been missions in hard places,” Moore told me. The challenge is knowing how to keep going and continue to foster the children’s growth in Kyiv—the difficult soil where they, and their families, have been planted.

A classroom at Kyiv Christian Academy Photo by William Fleeson

The war has also forced major changes in KCA’s methods of teaching, and caring for, the students facing the same dangers as any other city resident. Teachers are applying a type of pedagogy called trauma-informed instruction, in which they use special sensitivity with kids who show signs of discomfort.

Tim Vashchyshyn, a 31-year-old Bible studies teacher at KCA, detailed the challenges to his morning lessons—especially after all-too-frequent nights of aerial attacks.

“Whenever they come in, there’s so much stress, there’s so much anxiety,” Vashchyshyn explained. “So you have to find a creative way of how you can calm them down, sooth them.”

One morning, five air raid sirens went off before noon.

“We had to go up and down, up and down,” Vashchyshyn recalled.

He added that conditions are usually worse in Ukrainian public schools, where makeshift basement shelters are often unheated and unfinished. From these conditions, especially in winter, many children get sick and miss even more time in the classroom.

Moore described another measure that KCA never needed in peacetime: “calm-down corners.” These are open spaces where kids can go, or be sent, to settle and let pass a moment of frustration. The calm-down corners are scattered around the school’s premises, and offer comfortable chairs, toys and craft materials, and positive messages on the walls.

“If we have an air alert during lunchtime, kids may be more hyper, or they might be less likely to engage with work” in the afternoon, Moore said.

Or, he added, after a night of attacks—during which Kyiv’s missile defense systems emit deafening booms while shooting down Russian projectiles—a student’s time at school might be ruined the following day.

“In the morning, it may take them a lot longer before they’re ready to engage and they’re able to focus,” he said. “Sometimes, they might not be able to focus at all that day.”

For KCA’s youngest students, whose school schedule still includes a naptime or quiet period, those moments happen in the basement shelter. There, they don’t have to be awakened if an air raid alert sounds out again.

Natasha Batyreva works as a kindergarten teacher at Kyiv Christian Academy. Photo by William Fleeson

Moore learns a lot about what KCA students are experiencing by watching his own sons as they play. The boys are fans of Legos, and they use the interlocking pieces to create tanks and other battlefield vehicles.

“Some tanks they build are Russian tanks to be destroyed,” he said. “I don’t stop them from that, because they’re expressing something that they’re processing.”

Moore noted that many of the children at KCA repeat their parents’ “kitchen-table talk.” This rhetoric sometimes includes bitterness and strong impulses of animosity toward the Russian military—and toward Russia as a whole.

“Kids really take a lot of cues from adults,” Moore said. He hasn’t observed a great deal of anti-Russian feeling at KCA, but he occasionally hears sentiments like, “I hate the Russians!” He and other teachers use such moments to teach and correct—helping the students process their strong feelings.

“You also have to validate that anger,” Moore said. “When someone says, ‘I hate the Russians!’ you have to say, ‘Yeah, this is frustrating. I’m frustrated, too. This is not fair, and it’s not right.’”

But Moore hastens to ask students questions of discernment, such as, “‘But who’s responsible for this? Is it all Russians? No, it’s the military, it’s the leadership’” of Russia, he explained.

“Anger is not necessarily a bad emotion, it just depends on what you do with it,” he said. Every interaction is an opportunity to point the students to the hope of salvation and the ultimate peace that Jesus offers.

Natasha Batyreva, a kindergarten teacher and 20-year KCA veteran, sees a “beautiful, bright future” for her students and her country. She quotes Psalm 56:3—“When I am afraid, I put my trust in you”—as one of the Scriptural assurances that gives her strength.

KCA’s current arrangements have allowed the school to keep the lights on through resourcefulness and creativity. It operates a cost-sharing agreement with a Ukrainian-language private school, which uses many of the spaces that would otherwise stand empty. A local church pays to rent KCA space for Sunday worship. A kids sports ministry pays to use the school’s two soccer fields and basketball gym. Through measures like these, KCA manages to continue operating while students and families trickle back to Kyiv. Moore expects to enroll about 40 students for the coming school year.

Katya Kovolyova, who works in the school’s finance department, sees KCA’s return to growth as another source of encouragement—even if rising enrollment presents more challenges, like recruiting teachers who are willing to work in a conflict setting. Yet more students means more missionary families and activity. That creates a feeling of positive momentum for everyone, Kovolyova said.

And those efforts point toward an eternal Kingdom benefit, in a place where the gospel is needed both during wartime and after the fighting eventually ends.

“When you hear that some more missionary families are planning to come, and to be here, to help Ukrainians, it encourages you to continue doing what you’re doing,” Kovolyova said.

The ceaseless Russian attacks can feel overwhelming, she added. “But God, He’s protecting us.”

As my visit to KCA came to an end, Moore walked with me to the front door. A small, unruly boy, who might have been excited or scared or both, was speaking loudly. Moore bent to give the child a hug, spoke words of instruction, and led him to a teacher waiting nearby.

When I asked Moore about his outlook for the future, he referred back to the school’s essential mission.

“After this war, when other missionary families are able to come back, the school will be here,” he said. “The [postwar] work of the Church, supporting the Ukrainians that are already doing work to help others to recover and heal from this war … I want this school to be a part of that.”

Eric Moore is the director of Kyiv Christian Academy. Photo by William Fleeson