For Ukrainian students far from home, the war is never distant, Beatrix Lozach reminds us all, writing in The Shield, the student news magazine at McCallum High School in Austin, Texas.
Anastasiia Musiiaka, now a senior at the high school, still recalls the sleepless nights of air alerts during her last visit to Kyiv.
“Almost every night there were air alerts, which meant people had to go down to the shelters,” she was quoted as saying. “People live in constant fear of dying at any moment or losing their homes or loved ones, because you never know whose house will be next.”
Her friend Milana Titarenko, who fled to the Czech Republic, describes the war’s toll in ways both physical and emotional.
“For an entire month I didn’t eat anything, I only drank tea and sometimes had a small snack,” she said, explaining how trauma kept her indoors for half a year.
Yet even amid loss, she has witnessed resilience: “When I looked into [a Mariupol survivor’s] eyes, I saw a truly strong person. It was frightening even to imagine everything she had gone through.”
These individual stories echo the resilience seen across Ukraine but also remind us of the conflict’s ripple effects.
Recently, Russian drones strayed into Polish airspace, prompting NATO ally Poland to shoot them down and invoke Article 4 of the alliance treaty. That move raised fears of escalation far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“I think this is Russia testing the waters to see how far they can get without the UN responding,” a history teacher at Lower Dauphin High School was quoted as saying by Miya H in the school’s student newspaper.
Students are watching too, aware that the conflict could reshape their world in unexpected ways.
“I think it’s interesting because you never really know what anyone is thinking,” a Lower Dauphin student said. “We are kind of removed from it. It is all very new, so you never know where these things are going to go or how they will end up.”
For now, the voices of young people — whether in Kyiv, Austin, or Pennsylvania — capture both the immediacy of suffering and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.