Student Life in Ukraine
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When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was nineteen and in my third year of college. It was not the beginning of a war that had started long before, when I was twelve and still at school, still learning how to pronounce words like “occupation” and “annexation.” By 2022, the war had been going on for half of my life, sometimes in the background; but this time it would be constant. The invasion brought the war louder and closer. It entered every Ukrainian home and life, including mine.
I am now in the second year of my master’s degree. When I look back on that February morning in 2022, February 24, I see how it divided my life into “before” and “after,” and yet both halves belong to the same war that shaped my growing up. The invasion did not make me into an adult overnight. It made adulthood impossible to postpone.
For as long as I can remember, I have never regarded my future as stable. The horizon was always moving. People around me dreamed about what they would do when the war ended; but I never learned how to imagine that world. Half of my life has already been lived in wartime. Maybe I still do not know how to define “postwar.” What I do know is how to live inside of a war, to live through uncertainty, to accept that everything can change in a second, and to keep going anyway.
The feeling of loss, fear, pain, and despair has never disappeared. It stayed, and it stays, changing its contours over time. Living through it has made me older, maybe too much, too soon. The knowledge of fragility is a weight, and that weight has become a part of me.
There have been days without electricity or water, nights spent in shelters, weeks when the city is silent except for the sirens. Though you adapt, adaptation is not easy. Sometimes the hardest thing is the simplest: to sit through a lecture and think only about the lecture. Concentration itself becomes a luxury. And yet, fierce conditions engender a fierce gratitude. Taking a shower when the water runs, having light in the evening, opening a laptop with a charged battery to study, or talking to a friend who is far away — maybe even at the front line — each is a small miracle. The ordinary turns extraordinary. Joy stops being something grand and transforms into the ability to do something at all: to read, to learn, to prepare for a seminar, to talk, to live.
Before the invasion, I studied philology. Reading literature during the war changed the way I understood it. The abstraction faded from texts and theories, which were the means to survival and to thinking through the chaos around me. I no longer read only to analyze; I read to stay human. Some books helped me make sense of loss and others articulated what I could not say. “Understanding” itself shifted. It was personal, not intellectual. Even writing my thesis turned into a kind of reflection, a way to understand and create integrity, at least in the text, when in reality everything outside was so breakable.
After graduating with a degree in philology, I found myself wanting something more tangible. Reading and writing had taught me how language shapes thought, and I wanted to understand how these ideas become the decisions, laws and policies that influence people’s lives. That is what led me to public policy. At first, it registered as a shift to something more collective and interdependent. Soon I realized it was the same search for meaning, but on another scale and conducted through lens of government management.
My studies now focus on veterans’ well-being and social support. The policies we discuss in seminars reflect the faces and voices of people I have met while volunteering or working. Every law, every report, every number hides a story — and more often than not a wound. To interpret those layers is to learn a new language, a language connected to a policy and to the people whose destinies intertwine with this policy.
That is why public policy is for me. Systems can be made more humane; compassion and bureaucracy can overlap; states can care as individuals do. The more I study, the more I realize that data alone will not correct what is unfixed. Only understanding can do that. The war has built that bridge between my past and present studies. Literature instructed in me listening. The study of policy instructs me in acting.
My gratitude for being able to study is enormous. Many of my classmates and friends volunteered for the army when the full-scale invasion began. Some of them will never receive their diplomas because they were killed by Russia’s war. They chose to defend my country, our families, and people like me. Their decision continues to humble me. My brother made the same choice. In February 2022, he was in his second year of a master’s program and had only his thesis left to write, but he enlisted on the first day of the invasion. He put the protection of his family first.
Those people — my brother, my friends, my classmates — remind me about the imperative of purpose and responsibility. Their strength is the measure of my own. If I speak about the foundation for my studies, it is my family. Their care — the warm meals and the constant words of support — are the roots of everything I do. They carry the weight with me, never letting me feel alone.
Because I have a home that holds me, I can reach out to help others and to say thank you to our warriors. Together with a group of classmates, we created a volunteer coordination hub at our university to support our community: students, their families, friends, and those who were serving. We collected donations, delivered medicine and equipment, and tried to respond to everyday needs. Coordinating this work did not replace my studies. It changed how I understood them. Many of us who volunteered are students, and the connection between learning and helping gives meaning to both.
After some time, I started taking part in academic exchanges and short programs abroad. It was about making Ukraine more visible from the outside. When abroad, my task is to listen, to learn and to testify. When you come from a country at war, you are not allowed simply to be a student. Every presentation, every discussion, every introduction has the aura of a statement. You have to stay composed, precise, persuasive, and you cannot be too emotional. I was expressing my country’s credibility in every word I spoke, or so it could feel to me. And yet, I am grateful for those moments of dialogue, when people truly listened and asked questions – without pity. Such awareness modifies distance. Each real deep conversation is a small victory and a form of resistance.
When I look back at my nineteen-year-old self, the one who thought adulthood was still far away, I want to tell her that growing up is not so much leaving youth behind but carrying it through a fire. I want to tell her that light can be found even in the hardest time and that she can live without a horizon and still keep voyaging forward.
For me, education is now much more than reading a book or collecting arguments. I need texts that can change me, and I need to pay attention to language, to the person sitting across from me, to my neighbor on the tram, to the message I am afraid to open. There is a knowledge beyond theory, and it is rooted in human connection. Critical thinking has its place. Compassionate thinking matters just as much. It is not so much the inverse of critique as its gentler companion.
If you are reading this in a country at peace, I would not wish for you to go through this same experience of war. I would ask for something else. Talk about Ukraine. This is not only my story. It is the story of thousands of students who keep studying, hoping, and believing that the war will end, knowing it will not end without the effort and attention of many.
Wartime shows you that knowledge is alive. Ideas follow from and resonate with what is real around you. Ideas make demands. They guide you in staying human and becoming stronger when the war and Russian troops are trying to scare you, to break you and to kill you and your loved ones. The right ideas, the right education and the right knowledge give you courage and curiosity to take part in the world, to help protect it, to change it for the better, to rebuild it and to keep it human.
Anastassia Kostenko is an MA student at the Kyiv School of Economics.