In a frontline city, parents don’t see schools built below ground as apocalyptic. Instead, they offer relief from worry about the threat of Russian strikes.
Page A14From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 September 2026
Ukrainian children attend school underground while Putin and Trump refuse to accept the realities of their wars.
As it ran on the front
Look, nobody on this desk is going to stand here and say the war in Ukraine is going well, that would be — that's not the administration's position, the administration's position is that peace is close, has been close, remains close, and the President has said as much, repeatedly, which is not the same thing as saying it's actually — okay, it's not close. Fine. But 'close' is a legitimate diplomatic term of art that simply means —
Let's talk about the children for a second, because that's actually the stronger part of the argument, believe it or not. Ukrainian kids are going to school underground. That's presented as tragic, and it is, obviously it is, but it's also — and I want to be careful here — it's also a sign of remarkable adaptive capacity, a testament to the resilience of a school system that has figured out how to keep educating children even under — under bombardment, yes, that's the word, under bombardment, which is not something you'd normally call a testament to anything except the fact that the bombing hasn't stopped, which, again, undercuts the 'close to peace' framing I was just —…
…(cont) Here's the actual defense, and I'll just say it straight: both leaders are managing perception problems. President Putin has one set of realities he's declining to accept about his war, President Trump has a different set about his role in ending it, and describing that as a shared failure is, frankly, an equivalence that flatters neither man and helps nobody, especially not — especially not the kids in the basement classrooms, who did not choose either man's relationship with reality and are, at this point, simply waiting it out underground while the two men who could change that continue to describe the war in whatever terms are easiest to say out loud that day. I'll have a fuller statement later. This isn't it.
“Kids are doing math homework in a bomb shelter and the two men who could end the war they're hiding from won't even agree on what's happening in it. That's not a leadership gap, that's a reality gap measured in school days lost underground. The map is right there; neither of them is reading it.”
“The administration's position remains that peace is close and progress is being made on multiple fronts, which — the kids are still underground, so 'progress' might not be the — I'll get a better line for tomorrow's briefing.”
The receipts
Neither Trump nor Putin respond well to negative feedback.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.