Ukraine
After the beginning of the unwarranted full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation on February 24, 2022, the survival of not only academic freedom in Ukraine, but of academic life, was jeopardized. Conditions of military conflict in the past four years have had a staggering and debilitating impact on the infrastructure and people that make up the Ukrainian academy, impacting scholars, researchers, and students alike.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, as of February 2026, there were 3.7 million internally displaced people in Ukraine, as well as 5.9 million Ukrainian refugees globally and approximately 10.8 million in need of humanitarian assistance. In the early months of the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the World Bank recorded nearly 700,000 displaced students and over 25,000 educators. In the context of this conflict, Ukrainian higher education institutions have sustained heavy damage. As of March 2026, more than 400 of Ukraine’s 625 higher education institutions have been damaged and 11 completely destroyed in Russian attacks. According to a joint report between the Ukrainian government, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations, the cost of damages to Ukrainian educational institutions is estimated at $13.9 billion. This includes, as announced by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science in March 2026, three completely destroyed university buildings and 153 buildings that have been damaged. Recent cases reported by Scholars At Risk, include the targeting of the Kyiv School of Economics and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine with Russian missiles and drones on May 24, 2026, damaging key university infrastructure including classrooms and other university buildings. In May and April 2026, King Danylo University, Ukrainian State University of Science and Technology, Dnipro Polytechnic University, and the National Aerospace University Kharkiv were similarly targeted.
Unfortunately, the damage to Ukrainian higher education has not been merely material and infrastructural. Much more importantly, since February 2022, repeated attacks by the Russian armed forces on civilian targets, including higher education institutions, have resulted in the death and injury of many students, faculty, and staff. Most recently, on April 15, 2026, Russian missiles hit Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, killing software engineering student Ilya Bezbozhny. In 2024 and 2025, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack identified at least 40 instances of attacks against higher education facilities in Ukraine, mostly concentrated in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Kherson, and Sumy regions. On April 13, 2025, two Sumy State University students were killed in Russian strikes that targeted the university’s conference center. Another series of Russian attacks on June 17, 2025, hit student dorms near the Kyiv Aviation Institute, injuring students.
It is not just the most recent war that has destabilized academic life in Ukraine. In the decade preceding the invasion, Ukrainian educational institutions suffered from the Russian Federation’s constant military harassment. Between the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, 18 institutions of higher education were forced to move their operations to relatively safer locations. However, that former security has been compromised by the Russian invasion. The number of higher education institutions that were forced to relocate has now reached 43. Under these highly dangerous and precarious conditions under which universities are being forced to operate, such as but not limited to daily aerial bombardments and severe infrastructural and resource insufficiency, between 2014 and 2024, the number of students has decreased from 2.44 million to around 1 million. Meanwhile, the number of public universities has decreased to about 300 in 2025, down from 347 in 2022-23. Higher education institutions, especially those in regions that are currently under Russian occupation, have had to find ways to adapt to the reality of war in order to continue operations. One of those institutions, Berdyansk State Pedagogical University, has transitioned to what they call a “university without walls” model that depends on online classes and cooperation with other universities for physical spaces in order to deliver in-person education to students who have had to relocate to different regions around the country.
In addition to its direct impacts on Ukrainian higher education, the Russian invasion has also indirectly led to a decline in academic freedom. In the context of the massive public spending needed for the war effort, the institutional autonomy of public universities has been eroded through the centralization of higher education governance with the aim of reducing costs. Moreover, academia has been inevitably impacted by the constrained space for expression in the context of an ongoing war. According to T-Invariant, an independent news platform operated by exiled Russian scientists and science journalists, self-censorship has increased in Ukraine, especially on matters related to national identity, after the passage of a law in 2025 that adopted an official state position on Ukrainian national history. Amid fears of being accused of “collaborationism”, academics specializing in these issues have found it difficult to continue their academic work and express their views. One academic who has faced attacks over her work is Marta Havryshko, a historian of World War 2, the Holocaust, Ukrainian nationalism, and sexual violence in armed conflict. In recent years, Dr. Havryshko has received threats targeted towards her and her family for her work on Ukrainian nationalism and has been accused by many members of the Ukrainian far-right of being a Russian spy. Furthermore, in 2025, Dr. Havryshko was fired from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) for “absence from the workplace,” contrary to NASU’s established practice of allowing academic refugees to remain on unpaid leave until the end of the war. A July 2025 open letter in support of Dr. Havryshko received signatures from many academics from around the world.
It is evident that the future of a vibrant Ukrainian academy depends not only on the ability of Ukrainians to win this treacherous war, but also on the international academic and human rights community helping to enable and equip Ukrainian education and research in the meantime. Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) commends the financial and academic support provided by universities and other academic institutions across the globe which are hosting Ukrainian professors and students who have left their homes because of the war, including Ukrainian Global University (UGU), which has worked in partnership with the New University in Exile Consortium (the Consortium). The Consortium has compiled a comprehensive list of resources intended to support Ukrainian academics and students that can be found here, and the Consortium’s petition in support of Ukraine was also signed by over 2,500 people, which ESW has endorsed and circulated, as well. We encourage universities and colleges around the world to continue to forge collaborations with organizations like UGU in order to provide residential and remote fellowships to both those who have left and those that cannot leave Ukraine because of the legal constraints of martial law and those who deliberately choose to stay at their universities in solidarity with their colleagues and students. We invite the global community to join our call.
(Last updated August 13, 2026)
Please send appeals to your local and national representatives and review the resources below to donate, send appeals, and sign petitions in support of Ukraine:
