The school year was supposed to be coming to an end in Ukraine, and the students were heading for summer vacation. Valerie, 16, had already bought the dress for the graduation party at the school she studied in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Until a February 27 bombing destroyed the school three days after Russia invaded the country.
This week, more than three months after the conflict that devastated the country, Valerie and other students improvised a ball in what is now the rubble of the school, complete with a waltz and graduation dress, to mark what should have been the end of the high school.
The story is told by Anna Episheva, a Ukrainian who claims to be the girl’s aunt and shared images of the event on social media. The local press also published videos of the “party”, shared by the Ukrainian government and personalities from around the world.
“I am 16 years old, I study at school 134 in Kharkiv. I had a lot of friends at school, we were like a big family. With the girls, we chose dresses and we were happy that we would all look beautiful on graduation day. But the ‘Russian world’ came to us and ruined all our plans,” said the teenager according to a message shared by Episheva.
Images made by the local press show a group of ten students dancing a waltz in a court of the school, escorted by heavily armed soldiers and accompanied by parents and relatives.
Close to the Russian border, Kharkiv was the target of a series of attacks early in the war. In mid-May, Ukrainian forces managed to drive out Russian troops who had been besieging the city since the start of the invasion, according to UK intelligence, but attacks continued.
Last Tuesday (7), for example, a Russian bombing killed one person and injured two others, according to the city’s mayor. There is no exact number of casualties from the war so far. The last figure released by the governor of Kharkiv, on 15 April, put 503 civilians dead since the beginning of the war, including 24 children.
