Ukraine war: How Russia’s war is changing childhood in Ukraine

But once Nika is on the train, heading for class, her mother can stop worrying.

“Parents can be confident nothing’s going to happen to their child and a child can continue their more-or-less normal life,” Olha Bondarenko explains.

“The enemy can’t get us here.”

She says Nika has missed kindergarten, badly.

“It’s so important. Otherwise, a child doesn’t get to see any other kids, because there are none out on the streets and air raid sirens all the time.”

Kharkiv now offers close to 700 kindergarten places underground, for children aged up to six. At least three times that number of children attend school classes in the same space.

Some have lost parents in the fighting, or lived in areas under heavy fire, and need extra support from the psychologists on hand alongside the teachers.

The staff put everything into making things as normal as possible.

On the walls, beside brightly coloured pictures of flowers and giant caterpillars, there are posters about the danger of mines. But when the sirens go off warning of incoming missiles, no one needs to move.

The Bondarenko family fled town at the start of the war, as Russian troops were pushing to take Kharkiv and the shelling was constant.

Thousands of families were living in the metro then. In March 2022, I saw old ladies sleeping in train carriages and babies on the platforms with their parents.

When the Russian forces were pushed back that September, the city began to breathe more easily again and Olha and her children came home.

So the city has begun making more permanent underground arrangements.

In the Industrialny district, badly damaged by missile strikes, an entire new school is taking shape beneath a sports field.

The classrooms will be buried five metres below the surface with capacity for 900 students in two shifts.

For now, it’s an oblong shell with builders soldering, plastering and hammering, every way you turn.

The chief constructor tells me his firm built a fancy new zoo and redesigned a central park before the invasion. “Now we’re doing this,” he shrugs.

It reminds him of the nuclear bunkers built at Soviet factories during the Cold War.

“I really don’t want us to move underground. This is a forced safety measure,” the mayor explains, during a site inspection.

The school is due to be ready by the end of March, though that looks optimistic.