Ukraine: between resilience and exile — how war has transformed education, society, and the role of the Alliance Française

Odesa, 26 May 2026. The evening before, a ballistic missile struck the city’s port, one kilometre from terraces that were still full of people. The next day, Yaroslava arrives with the calm and bearing of a strong woman who has learned to work to the rhythm of the sirens. Director of Odesa’s French association, she teaches classes, organises events, and has spent twenty years nurturing close ties with French institutions and media. From pandemic to war, her institution has lived through it all. In this struggle, this inspiring woman has resolved to fight for education and culture — causes that have, for her, become fronts in their own right.

2022: collapse and exile

It all begins in a haze. “A very sad and depressing period,” she recalls. Uncertainty is total; anticipation impossible. No one knows where the war is heading, what will become of Ukraine, or even whether Odesa will hold. Cities are bombed relentlessly or fall one by one beneath the pressure of the Russian onslaught. Fear settles into the streets, and restrictions multiply. The French Embassy, which supports the Alliance financially and logistically, imposes a strict security framework: closure to the public. Cultural gatherings are forbidden, even outdoors. What future is Ukraine heading towards? The institution pivots entirely online — a reflex acquired during Covid that would prove a lifeline for the Alliance Française’s survival.

It is during the first winter of the conflict that daily life becomes a physical trial layered upon the psychological one: power cuts of ten to twenty-four hours, buildings without heating, refrigerators rendered useless — extreme conditions. The war is fought in the mind as much as in the streets: insomnia, exhaustion, pain, the ceaseless analysis of sounds — drones, explosions, glide bombs — the ritual of the siren and the immediate descent into the shelter, sometimes for three or four hours — and it is no drill. In a reality that never warns you when the next strike will land.

Paradoxically, the war opens the door to a new public: exiles fleeing to French-speaking countries — France, Belgium, Switzerland — in search of affordable French lessons taught by Ukrainian-speaking teachers, like an escape route from a daily life lived under falling bombs. At a distance, the school continues to exist; but the director can no longer hold on. Children, bombardment, a future in limbo — Yaroslava leaves the country for Poland. She will stay five months. Five months as a refugee. Five months living what millions of Ukrainians abroad endure: uprootedness, isolation, the language barrier, the search for housing, for work, for a new beginning — and that status of foreigner which strips away your rights. “You are not free, even in safety,” she says.

2023: returning to a city in slow motion

In April 2023, she decides to go home. Not because the war is over, but because that life is not hers. In her choice to stay, there is a visceral attachment to her country, the feeling — shared by some — that leaving would amount to betraying those who give their lives for it, and who choose to remain as an act of protest against the invasion. And that Ukrainian proverb she cites as self-evident: “The walls you were born in keep you warm” — as if to say that comfort, paradoxically, is found at home, even under the constant threat of bombs.

What she finds in Odesa is a hollowed-out city. “It’s heartbreaking to see your city in slow motion.” Shops are closed, “for rent” signs pile up, the rhythm of life has collapsed. And yet the tension has eased a notch: businesses reopen, shops fill up again, “business is picking up.” The Alliance Française, for its part, must rebuild itself, for the war has driven away more than half of its teaching staff. “They were afraid…” she says, a judgement in her voice she makes no effort to conceal. The foreign-language teachers have gone, often abroad, joining students who left before them. Rebuilding a team in a country at war is a challenge in itself: recruiting, training, reorganising everything, while maintaining online classes and devising new hybrid formats. The Alliance rises to this considerable challenge. That same year, it organises an intercultural week dedicated to France, in partnership with the city council, featuring concerts and French-language events. Culture and education become an act of resistance — a refusal of submission, even at a distance.

It is at this moment that the crisis of the education system reveals its full scale. Schools without shelters have closed; pupils have been redistributed among those that have them, on a morning/afternoon rotation — not for pedagogical reasons, but because bomb shelters have limited capacity. Half of all teaching takes place online, half in person — when possible. And quality pays the price: less experienced remaining teachers, permanent disruption, pupils exhausted by years of distance learning dating back to Covid. From this emerges a generalised loss of motivation, and a sense of isolation born among teachers and pupils alike.

2024: a renaissance, in altered form

2024 marks a notable improvement. The offices reopen five afternoons a week. Enrolments rise, but in a profoundly altered format: more online classes, less in-person teaching. The summer brings a visible return of French culture to the city: the intercultural week with the city council, participation in the Odesa Jazz Fest, and in June a concert of French music with a singer flown in from France, alongside an exhibition at the museum.

But the challenges remain. The shortage of teachers has become a national problem: schools and universities lack teachers because of the exodus. School logistics have grown more complex: the morning/afternoon rotation has become generalised, with Ukrainian education as a whole reorganised around a single constraint — surviving an attack.

Sadly, the consequences are sometimes tragic. Yaroslava tells of the death of a twelve-year-old girl, taken by a heart attack during an air-raid alert in Odesa — the body of a child that can no longer bear the stress. Behind this quiet devastation looms a demographic crisis that worries the director more than anything else: “We have lost many of our young people, and we are still losing them.” Indeed, boys of sixteen and seventeen are leaving the country en masse to escape conscription; parents are sending their children abroad; families are splintering, divorces multiplying; women of childbearing age are often gone. As a result, the birth rate collapses while the population ages, and an entire generation is sacrificed to protect the country. Schools close, university programmes disappear for lack of students, and the ambitions of a professional future in Ukraine dim little by little. Ukraine’s future is being decided there, silently.

In this difficult landscape, one certainty reassures Yaroslava: “France is still here.” Behind that sentence lie funding, logistics, classrooms that stay open — the embassy, the Alliance’s discreet pillar, even if its drastic security framework sometimes closes its doors. In this wartime atmosphere, culture refuses to be confined. Projects continue to emerge, such as the journey of ten teenagers from Odesa’s bilingual lycée who will set down their suitcases in Lyon for fourteen days of French immersion. Two weeks without sirens, without shelters, without nights broken by the sound of alerts and explosions. In a Ukraine learning to keep its dreams alive through solidarity, the ambition fits in a single line: to offer children of war a slice of ordinary life. Almost nothing — and yet everything, for these children whose only adolescence is the threat of Russian missiles.

2025: relative “normality”

By the start of the 2025 school year, the Alliance is registering as many enrolments as before the war. Its methods have embraced digital tools and a flexibility that has become vital — a class must be able to stop for an alert, resume after a power cut, or relocate if the war demands it. Over time, the public has changed: fewer children and teenagers in person, more adults and refugees, with fees adjusted for Ukrainians abroad. Adaptation has become second nature for Ukrainian society, which has reinvented itself in order to keep moving forward.

How does one hold on for four years? Yaroslava says it plainly: there is no psychological toolkit, no programme designed to overcome the ordeal. Only the necessity to survive, and a sentence that says it all: “If you’re not resilient, you die.” In this context, resilience is not a virtue. It is a survival mechanism. “We have all adapted to the war. We have no right to go soft.”

But adaptation has a price. “The people who were strong… they’ve cracked now,” she observes after four years of unrelenting stress. Psychological exhaustion is catching up with those who thought themselves immune.

2026: resilience despite exhaustion

Since 2026, Yaroslava describes her community as accustomed to the war, but at the cost of severe psychological exhaustion. On the war itself, she says, anger is growing: against leaders who lack the will to stop the slaughter of their children, husbands and parents; against an armistice perceived as remote and impossible; against stolen time that can never be recovered: “They have stolen five years of my life, and our children’s childhood.” Five years nothing will ever give back — five years of childhood spent counting explosions instead of stars. Yet in her vocabulary, the watchwords remain resilience and courage: “We have no right to go soft” — given the “necessity to survive.”

On reconciliation with Russia, she compares the bond to a couple after a betrayal: a long, complex process, hindered by the weight of the bereavements, disabilities and traumas suffered by her people. “Forgiveness will take time. There have been too many deaths, too much disability, too much deep trauma.” And she adds, with a humanism that yields nothing to her anger: “Nothing is worth a war. Everything can be negotiated.”

Her own dream fits into an image of disarming simplicity: to see planes in the sky again. Civil aircraft, gone from the Ukrainian landscape for four years. A simple, ordinary life — nothing more. Until then, she lives day by day, granting herself temporary exiles to catch her breath, and continues to do what she considers a moral duty: preserving children’s education and the flourishing of French culture, whatever the cost.

This portrait is not merely that of the director of a cultural association. It is the portrait of a city that has learned to live with war without ever resigning itself to it; of a school that reopens its doors between two alerts; of a French culture that continues to shine on the shores of the Black Sea. In Odesa, some shopkeepers and teachers have fled, children live to the rhythm of the sirens, the threat of bombardment is constant, and attacks are often daily. Yet every afternoon, behind an unassuming façade, French classes resume. This school, led with strength and courage by this woman, mirrors Ukrainian society itself. Despite the attacks, the power cuts and the pressure, society seeks a form of normality within a daily life torn apart by war. Because life, even mutilated, never stops — and because the future of a country that refuses to submit must still be prepared.