Kyiv prom dancers celebrate resilience amid Ukraine war scars

Masha Polska, 15, had been dreaming of a star turn in the group waltz, but Kyiv’s prom unfolded under the strain of Russia’s full-scale war. Her missed moment sat inside a larger ritual across Ukraine, where graduation dances have become one of the few places teenagers can still perform normal life in public.

UNICEF says the war is affecting Ukraine’s 7.5 million children, and more than 900,000 of them are studying online as air-raid alarms and damaged schools continue to interrupt in-person lessons. In shelters and classrooms alike, students have kept rehearsing waltzes and talking about graduation while shelling and repeated disruptions shape what should have been a final school year.

The same tension was visible in Kyiv last year, when graduates waltzed at the city’s central railway station while air-raid sirens sounded. Spanish violinist Leticia Moreno played at UNICEF’s invitation, and the students came from Irpin Lyceum No. 3, a school that was destroyed by a missile attack in 2022 and later rebuilt with UNICEF support.

UNICEF said nearly 230,000 children were expected to graduate from high school in Ukraine in 2024, but only 55 percent had the chance to study full-time during their final school year. The numbers underline how sharply war has narrowed the ordinary milestones that frame adolescence, from classroom routines to the final dance before adulthood.

The damage has kept mounting. UNICEF said in late 2025 that more than 340 educational facilities in Ukraine were damaged or destroyed that year alone, bringing the total since February 2022 to 1,611 schools and educational facilities. In a country where a prom dance can take place beside sirens and rebuilt classrooms, Masha’s empty spot in the waltz marked the cost of a war that has reached into every stage of growing up.