EU and Lithuania provide €15.5 million for school shelters in Ukraine

The European Union announced yesterday that it would allocate €15 million to build new school shelters in Ukraine. Lithuania is contributing an additional €0.5 million and taking responsibility for implementing the project.

Shelters are planned to be built first of all in the most war-affected regions of Ukraine – Chernihiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhya, Kharkiv, and Odesa regions. It is planned to build at least five shelters in these frontline regions.

All shelters will be underground, with an area of about 2,000 square metres. They will be located near schools and protected from radiation. Each room is designed for 1,000 people. The new shelters will not only protect against attacks, but will also allow children to continue learning and participate in extracurricular activities during air raids.

According to the EU, one in seven Ukrainian schools is currently damaged or destroyed as a result of targeted Russian attacks on educational infrastructure. Some 1.6 million schoolchildren and 0.2 million kindergarten students are not attending school or pre-school, and some 900,000 children study remotely.

For schools in Ukraine to be operational it is obligatory to have a shelter or at least an equipped basement. There are over 13,000 schools in Ukraine, 3,500 of which do not have these necessary wartime facilities.

The Lithuanian agency CPVA, which will implement the project, has selected schools with the largest number of pupils that do not have a minimum number of shelters. The construction of shelters for these schools will allow approximately 5,000 students to return to normal education within a year and a half.

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