The contrast between the organised symmetry of the buildings of the former Augustinian monastery in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, now the home of the European Humanities University, and the 68 Ukrainian universities that have been either damaged or destroyed by the Russians could not have been more stark.
Yet, at the same time, the stately and serene monastery provided a fitting backdrop for the acceptance by Professor Kateryna Horiunova of the 2024 Scholars at Risk (SAR) “Courage to Think Award” on behalf of Ukrainian scholars.
Overlooking the courtyard where the ceremony was held on 26 June is the former Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Consolation, finished in 1768, with its baroque façade and four-tiered bell tower seemingly held aloft by stubby Corinthian columns that evoke the grandeur of Ancient Greece.
Here, Horiunova described the extraordinary lengths one colleague had gone through to remain an active scholar in wartime: “She takes exams at gas stations, as this is the only place with internet during blackouts. She also connects to department meetings from the subway, taking her [four] children with her during the air raids.”
After paying tribute to the “academics who every day show and teach resilience to the world” and thanking Ukraine’s international partners who have ensured that Ukrainian scholars “are able to feel and be an integral part of the international community”, Horiunova turned to speak of her own university where she teaches marketing and tourism.
Mariupol State University, a scant ten blocks from the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre where hundreds of children died when the Russians bombed it on 16 March 2022, and which itself was totally destroyed, has risen like a phoenix.
“It has ambitious plans for building a new campus of the future in the heart of Ukraine’s capital,” she said.
By setting the award in the context of the freedom “to think, to speak, to explore, to research, to plan and to have a future, and the right to live freely”, Horiunova also set the award and the scholars gathered in Vilnius to celebrate it against the unhappy reality of university education in temporarily occupied Ukraine where, seven months after the invasion, the Russians had dragooned students into universities they controlled that reprised edicts of the Tsars by requiring Ukrainians to study in Russian – the language of the invader.
Network of protection
Based at New York University, Scholars at Risk is a network of 664 higher education institutions in 43 countries devoted to protecting scholars around the world and documenting abuse of scholars and threats to academic freedom.
In announcing the award, Robert Quinn, SAR executive director, noted: “The courage and dedication of the scholars of Ukraine is both exceptional and inspiring: exceptional in withstanding such a prolonged and violent assault, including repeated bombardments, occupations, and displacements on a mass scale; inspiring in their demonstrated solidarity and creativity in supporting each other, their students, and their institutions.
“They put their careers, and at times their lives, on the line because they know that the future of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people depend in good part on research and teaching that supports rebuilding, inspires and empowers young Ukrainians, and defends Ukrainian nationality and culture against the current attempt to eradicate them.”
A unique diaspora
Ten years before Horiunova’s appearance at the SAR conference in Vilnius, in June 2014, less than three months after pro-Russian insurgents seized power in Luhansk and Donetsk, Ukraine’s eastern-most and most industrialised oblasts (and Russia annexed Crimea), military units blocked the entrance to Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University (VD-EUNU) and access to some buildings at the university in Luhansk where Professor Yuriy Dyachenko taught.
“In the summer,” he told University World News, “these illegal armed formations began shelling the city.”
Though the shelling killed and destroyed infrastructure, its main purpose, Dyachenko said: “was to create chaos, havoc and the feeling of anxiety. Some people were killed by the shelling”.
In early July, as the trains were still running, Dyachenko moved his family to Kharkiv, which was (and is) in Ukrainian controlled territory.
In late summer, Dyachenko and many of the other faculty who had left Luhansk were called to Severodonetsk where VD-EUNU had a branch, a key city in the region with a population of 100,000 that the forces of the so-called ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ had occupied in May but were pushed out of by Ukrainian forces at the end of July 2014.
I asked Dyachenko the same question I asked the other two professors interviewed for this article and whose universities are among the 68 that form a unique diaspora: “What did it mean to you to have to leave the buildings, the campus that you had taught in for so long?”
Remembering back to 2014 and the fact that the Ukraine army had liberated Severodonetsk, Dyachenko answered: “We didn’t think it would be for a long time. We hoped to return to our campus in Luhansk in two or three months. However, universities are more than buildings.
“Most of all they are relationships between humans. Accordingly, my feelings about losing the buildings were not very strong.”
Re-establishing the university, Dyachenko explained, as would Mariupol State University, the Rector Professor Mykola Trofymenko, involved “restoring the management systems, computer systems and other administrative systems” – all of which was done by 1 October.
What the university couldn’t do, however, was provide education to the students who remained in territory controlled by insurgent forces.
“At this time Luhansk was encircled. It was without electricity and water. Students could not connect to the internet,” said Dyachenko.
Equally important to Dyachenko and his colleagues was the fact that on the grounds of Luhansk University, pro-Russian separatists opened the so-called Dahl University of the People’s Republic, where the language of teaching was Russian, as was the subject matter.
According to Pavlo Fedorchenko-Kutuev, a professor of sociology at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute: “Russian policy on temporarily occupied territories is nothing short of genocide since the occupying forces seek to annihilate Ukrainian culture, language and educational practices.
“Russians praise themselves for the destruction of Ukrainian books, textbooks as well as the murdering of Ukrainian intellectuals and writers.”
The occupation of Berdyansk
Berdyansk is a seaport city of 120,000 on the Sea of Azov. In early 2022, the eponymous university had some 4,500 students divided among six faculties.
On the night of 21 February 2022, Professor Igor Lyman and his wife, Victoria, both historians at the university, listened to Putin’s speech in which he announced the formal recognition of both the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic.
“We immediately understood that his speech was not about the status of these ‘republics’, but about the non-recognition of Ukraine,” Lyman said.
Lyman was more than an historian. He was head of the history and philosophy department.
Additionally, he was coordinator of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University’s International Relations Department. He was a public figure, who appeared on local television presenting local history.
His books explored the history of the city and region. He knew he was exactly the sort of Ukrainian nationalist the Russians would arrest and, quite possibly, murder.
His and his wife’s fear was hardly hyperbolic. He heard sometime later from a neighbour, that not long after the occupation of their city, “occupiers carrying machine guns broke the door of my flat to try to arrest me”.
The Lymans fled their home city two days before the full-scale invasion seeking safety 200 km away.
Later, their colleagues’ flights to safety would take between four and seven days as they had to negotiate some 20 Russian roadblocks before reaching safety in the Ukrainian controlled territory in Zaporizhia oblast.
Lyman and his colleagues re-established Berdyansk University as an online university. But they had difficulties continuing to serve their students who were trapped behind Russian lines.
“One of the main problems was the internet connection. From the very beginning of the Russian occupation, they jammed mobile phone communication, and cut the phone and internet lines between occupied territories and the rest of Ukraine,” Lyman told University World News.
“I understand that they also controlled some of the Telegram channels, so we could not communicate with our students there. [Telegram is a communication platform similar to WhatsApp and the main one used in Eastern Europe.]”
The reconstituted Berdyansk University has, Lyman explained, fallen in university rankings because, to protect the families of students who were able to flee the Russian occupation, it is no longer as open with information as it had been.
“Every university publishes announcements, pictures and articles about its main activities and about research.
“Under the conditions of the relocated university, we decided not to do this because many of our students and faculty have family in occupied Ukraine and we don’t want to give the Russians any information about them because it would be dangerous for those under occupation. So, we have dropped in the Webometrics ranking,” said Lyman of the university that now has about 3,500 students.
Russian officials wasted little time in repurposing the campus of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University as the site of the faculty of the Melitipol State University, an amalgamation of the remnants of Berdyansk University, Melitipol State Pedagogical University and two other regional universities.
One year later, the Russians transformed the faculty in Berdyansk into the Azov Pedagogical University.
Lyman spoke of the pressure that Russian authorities put on students of the former Berdyansk University and, especially, on their parents.
“The Russian system of oppression is total and systematic. It’s efficient. It’s impossible to know how many of our students they pressured to stop being students in our university.”
Nor was the Russian messaging subtle. They named the Melitipol State University after Anton Makarenko, lauded in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on him as “the most influential educational theorist in the Soviet Union” who “elaborated the theory of and methodology of upbringing in self-governing child collectives and introduced the concept of productive labour into the educational system”.
Not until long after Wikipedia reported that UNESCO ranked Makarenko as being as important as John Dewey or Maria Montessori, does it report that in 1935, the Ukrainian-born Makarenko worked for the Kyiv office of NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB.
Mariupol under attack
Within hours of the full-scale attack on Mariupol on 24 February 2022, Trofymenko, Mariupol University’s rector, was directing the loading of as many documents as possible and vital computer servers into a minibus, his own car (that would also carry him, his wife, five-year-old son and the university’s official stamp) and several other cars.
This small convoy made its way to safety in Dnipro, some five hours north-west. Two days later, over the objections of the Secret Service and National Police, Trofymenko (along with his wife, who refused to let him go alone, and son) was headed back to Mariupol.
“The National Police said going back was crazy. But I think that every manager should be with his institution; like a captain of a ship; it’s our obligation to show the example to our people,” he told University World News.
On this trip, he was stopped at many roadblocks manned by Ukrainian soldiers and that several times he saw missiles fired by the Ukrainians at Russian forces that were crossing the bridges from Crimea, he said.
He likened the scenes he witnessed over the next three weeks that he and his family spent in Mariupol to what is shown in the 2024 Oscar winning documentary Twenty Days in Mariupol.
Before becoming rector of Mariupol University, Trofymenko had been elected to the city council, so he was intimately involved in governing a city that was under siege and had no electricity, gas or water, and had dwindling food supplies.
Days were spent looking for food and medicines for the 100 foreign students, mostly from Central Asia, holed up in the university’s dormitories; they were finally evacuated with the help of a Muslim religious organisation.
One attack caused a fire in his apartment building. “We were fighting it when a missile hit one of the apartments in the building causing more damage,” he said.
He spoke of the panic experienced when: “sitting in a basement with a lot of people you didn’t know, and you don’t know if the Russian bombs would blow up and the building would collapse like a house of cards.
“You had to search for water that you could give your son. (A small mercy, Trofymenko says, was that his son’s reaction to the explosions was to fall immediately to sleep.)
You had to search for food and then think of how to cook it over an open fire – but it’s impossible to cook over an open fire when they were constantly shelling the city”.
He paused and apologised for tearing up, before continuing: “It’s impossible to think about whether your son will get to eat.” Then, in an incredulous voice, he said: “In 21st century Europe, you’re asking yourself this question: ‘What do you need for your child to eat’?”
In mid-March, when the Red Cross and other NGOs ordered their staff to evacuate, Trofymenko decided that he and his family would try to evacuate with them.
Since there was neither phone nor internet service, he and the remaining Mariupol staff used word of mouth to spread that message that, even though the Russians had refused to agree to a Green (evacuation) Corridor, a convoy had been organised to try to flee the ruined city.
It took 12 hours to go the first 80 km. At each Russian checkpoint, Trofymenko feared he’d be recognised and stopped.
Luck, he said, was on his side as the Russian soldiers manning the roadblock also had no internet connection and were unable to check his passport. “They were unprepared for thousands of cars, so they just let us through,” he said.
A second relocation
The full-scale Russian invasion displaced Dyachenko again.
“We expected an invasion of Ukraine from the south, from Crimea, but we didn’t expect it from the north toward Severodonetsk. But the shelling soon forced VD-EUNU to move to Kamianets-Podilskyi,” he said.
The evacuation of the faculty and staff was organised partly by the United Nations Development Program, the UK-based BEARR Trust, the Ukraine-based NGO “Prostir Foundation”, Catholic charity Caritas, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and VD-EUNU.
But only about 10% of the university’s students evacuated with it, partially, Dyachenko explained, “because we were going far and to a not very well-known place”. Those students who did evacuate to Kamianets-Podilskyi found it difficult to find apartments.
In October 2022, the university moved again, this time to Kyiv, where the ministry allotted them one floor in a building.
Student heroes
Most of the students of these three universities were able to evacuate either to Ukrainian controlled territory, to other European countries, or to North America, and have been able to continue their studies online.
Each of the professors interviewed for this article noted how the COVID-19-caused campus shutdowns were, at least for Ukrainian higher education, an opportunity to learn how to teach and learn online.
Russian efforts to cut the education link between students in temporarily occupied Ukraine and their former universities have not been completely successful.
Today, using VPNs, several hundred students, about 13% of Berdyansk University’s enrolment, live in temporarily occupied Ukraine; a smaller number continue to study at Mariupol University.
Trofymenko referred to these students – who, it is believed, connect at internet cafes or other public places, risk arrest if they are overheard speaking Ukrainian in public or if authorities see Ukrainian material on the computer screens – as ‘heroes’.
Lyman put an historian’s gloss on what it means that there are students on temporarily occupied territory who continue to study at Ukrainian universities.
“First of all, it means they plan to continue their work in Ukrainian territory, under Ukrainian law, and in Ukrainian, even if Berdyansk and their villages are occupied. It means they plan to work in Ukraine once their villages are no longer occupied.
“Otherwise, they will lose their perspective as Ukrainians and start to study in Russian education programmes,” he said.
Then, speaking of the intellectual struggles of his students, Lyman pointed to the weight of Russian propaganda students have to cope with.
“In occupied areas, the amount and power of Russian propaganda is higher than in Moscow or St Petersburg. If you live in these areas, it’s all over, everywhere.
“But, if the student is clever, they can question the reality and what they see on Russian television. In some cases, in fact, they ask more questions than other students. And this is normal. They ask more questions about Ukrainian textbooks, about the evaluation of the past, etc. It’s called the critical approach,” he said.
Studying the war
For Dyachenko, who now teaches economics at the Kyiv School of Economics, the full-scale war was a staple of his teaching, providing, for example, material on how changing international relationships impact economic models and flows – as is the case with Western sanctions against Russians.
The problems with Russia, he underscored, began in 2014 with the Revolution of Dignity (also known as the Maidan Revolution, which overthrew President Victor Yanukovych, who in a surprise move turned from supporting Ukraine’s bid to become part of the European Union to supporting further integration with Russia, as demanded by Putin), which prompted the invasion of Crimea and the insurgencies in the Donbas.
“The EU offered Ukraine one economic model and Russia its own. In consecutive classes, we discuss the consequences of economic integration with Russia and then the economic consequences of economic integration with the European Union,” he said.
That “Russia is an empire bent on subjugating and conquering its neighbours is so self-evident that you don’t have to bring it up during our classes,” Dyachenko said.
Ukraine’s existential struggle, Lyman explained, provides his history students with a unique opportunity to better understand the events of the past.
For example, I asked: “What would be the difference between a paper written five years ago about the German occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War and one written today?”
He answered: “I can say that my students understand the occupation and source material much better now. Why? There are a lot of gaps in the documents, so we study oral history.
“As a member of the Ukrainian Association of Oral History, I have had my students collect oral historical data recollections of the Second World War. There we often find situations when old people don’t want to answer many questions about the occupation.
“Now, when someone doesn’t want to answer, we understand much better why. They may omit information about the occupations. They don’t want to speak about what we know when we ask.”
Sometimes, he explained, people omit traumatic experiences. “And sometimes, as in 1943 when the Soviet regime returned, many people under occupation were considered betrayers, collaborators with Nazi Germany.
“You have to understand that it was Soviet policy that even two years after [the Nazis were driven out] people should be explaining themselves, everything they did during the occupation. That’s one of the reasons it was so traumatic.
“Today we see that many people from Berdyansk don’t want to say things, that they are ready to lie about things, about the occupation, because of relatives and friends,” he said.
A civic university
The rebirth of Mariupol University (in Kyiv) is not, Trofymenko, said, the re-establishment of the old university.
Rather: “We’re building an absolutely new university” in a refurbished building built in 1932 – ironically, a year emblazoned in the memory of every Ukrainian because it was the beginning of the Holodomor, the famine that killed as many as 5 million Ukrainians, as Stalin’s secret police stripped Ukraine bare of grain and seed potatoes.
Trofymenko described this new institution as a “civic university”.
After pointing to the university’s growing expertise in cyber security, computer science, its receipt of grants from the Rolls Royce Corporation and the American government (and a visit by Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State), as well as its traditional strength in education studies, Trofymenko said that not long after relocating to Kyiv, the university took on the role of being an humanitarian hub.
At first, this was for its faculty, students, staff and the Mariupol diaspora in Kyiv. It involved helping people find food, hygienic supplies, funds and other things needed by internally displaced persons.
Now, said Trofymenko, the hub is being transformed into a civic centre that connects the university to the community in more ways.
Among them are events for the diasporic community and courses in computers, Ukrainian and English for elderly internally displaced persons. For younger members of the community, there are concerts and children’s events.
Putin’s animus towards Mariupol
Russia’s determination to destroy the city of Mariupol – which was celebrated on RU.TV – is usually attributed to a combination of the city’s strategic position on the Sea of Azov, its being a railway hub and the decision of Ukraine’s “Azov Battalion” to make a last ditch stand in the sprawling Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which held up the city’s conquering by more than two months.
But neither alone nor together do these explanations truly account for the ferocity of the siege –the bombing of the city’s maternity hospital or the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre that, following Red Cross rules, was clearly indicated to be sheltering children; the destruction of the university and thousands of buildings across the city.
The scale of destruction is even more incomprehensible given that within a year, Russians were lining up to buy apartments with seaside views in recently constructed buildings.
Trofymenko, who taught international relations and foreign policy before becoming Mariupol’s rector, offered another explanation for his city’s agony: Mariupol “annoyed Putin” because of its dynamic development.
It was annoying to him. Why?
Because Mariupol, the capital of this region, showed the occupied areas the means of development. It showed that it is much more comfortable, much more European in the sense of quality of services, to be in Mariupol.
“This is important because it’s soft power, not military power. Ukraine is a peaceful state; we always try to use soft power to convince our people that to be Ukrainian is much more comfortable for them personally.
“And, in this sense, it was annoying to Putin because since 2014 [Luhansk and Donetsk] didn’t show any dynamism or any kind of development. I don’t even remember if one building was built,” he said to the rector.
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