In recent days, a Russian missile struck yet another apartment building, killing a nine-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl – along with nine adults. “This is safer than sitting in front of a screen at home alone,” Oksana Barabash, a 39-year-old homemaker, told Al Jazeera after dropping off her son Nazar, a first-grader who had never attended kindergarten because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war. In August 2025, a drone flew into an apartment building in the district, killing an 18-month-old girl and a 16-year-old boy along with five adults. “They wanted to leave us without our past, history, culture, knowledge,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook on September 1, 2022, the first day of term in Ukraine, next to photos of ruined schools. Despite being the cradle of Ukrainian nationalism and literature and Soviet Ukraine’s first capital between 1919 and 1934, by the 1970s, Kharkiv had almost exclusively switched to Russian. “I’m an old-timer, I keep speaking Russian, but my grandchildren need to speak Ukrainian,” Anna Mikhalchuk, a 67-year-old retired factory worker, told Al Jazeera, as she waited for her granddaughter sitting on a bench inside the subway station.