Ukraine's first underground kindergarten has opened in the Kharkiv region, the country's Ministry of Education announced. The facility, named "Mobil," is located in the Pisochyn community, on the edge of the city of Kharkiv, and is designed to hold 260 children. The Ministry's press service released photographs of the facility's classrooms and shelter corridors alongside the announcement.
The Ministry said the underground space allows the kindergarten to run a full educational program even while air raid alerts are in effect, since children and staff can reach the shelter without going outside.
Air raid alerts are issued across Ukraine when Russian missiles, drones or artillery fire are considered an active threat, often forcing schools to pause lessons or move students into shelters until the danger passes.
Inside the underground facility
The facility has eight classrooms, a medical point, a dining room, sanitary rooms and showers, according to the Ministry. It also includes elevators, lifts and barrier-free routes built for people with disabilities.
The shelter runs independently of the main power grid, drawing on two separate electricity sources plus backup generators, the Ministry said. It is linked to the kindergarten's main buildings through protected passages, meaning children and staff can move underground without stepping outdoors. Backup generators and independent power lines have become common features in newly built Ukrainian shelters, keeping lighting, heating and medical equipment running during blackouts caused by strikes on the energy grid.
State funding reaches nine regions
The Pisochyn kindergarten was built with combined funding from the state, regional and local budgets, the Ministry said.
The Ministry added that 2026 is the first year Ukraine has set aside a dedicated state subvention specifically for building shelters in preschool institutions, with total funding for the program exceeding 972 million hryvnias, Ukraine's national currency. A subvention is a grant transferred from the state budget to regional or local budgets to pay for a specific purpose, in this case shelter construction.
Similar projects funded under the program are underway in nine regions: Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv and Kherson.
Shelters have become routine in Ukrainian schools
Ukraine has increasingly built shelters into new and renovated public buildings as the war stretches into its fifth year, aiming to keep schools and kindergartens running despite continued Russian attacks. Russia's full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022, has forced schools and kindergartens across the country to hold classes underground or in shelters during frequent air raid alerts. The Kharkiv region, which borders Russia, has been repeatedly targeted since the war began.
Shelter capacity still varies widely from one school to the next. Education ombudswoman Nadiya Leshchyk told LIGA.net that schools in Kyiv would not be able to operate on a single, unified teaching format, because conditions differ between buildings, including how many people each shelter can hold. Ukraine's education ombudsman is an independent official who monitors conditions in schools and safeguards students' rights nationwide. Ukrainian schools without adequate shelters have often been required to switch to remote learning during the war.
Private developers are building similar protections
Separately, the construction firm Perfect Group is designing safe rooms for its new residential projects modeled on Israel's "mamad" rooms. The term mamad is a Hebrew acronym for merchav mugan dirati, meaning "residential protected space." Mamad rooms, built from reinforced concrete, have been a standard feature of new apartments in Israel since the 1990s and are designed to withstand blasts and shrapnel.
