Air raid alarms eat into more than a tenth of school hours in Ukraine, UN children's agency reports

3 November 2026

The United Nations Children's Fund has reported almost 2,000 attacks on education in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of 2022, including about 270 this year. Since the academic year began, children have sat through an average of 34 hours of air raid alarms during school time, more than 13 per cent of scheduled learning hours. In the Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad and Kharkiv regions alarms during school time crossed 60 hours, close to a quarter of scheduled learning, affecting more than 560,000 children. In Kyiv the number of alarms in September rose from 12 a year earlier to 71. UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires gave the figures, and the Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, and the head of Education Cannot Wait, Maysa Jabout, also spoke. The agency called for schools and children to be protected under international humanitarian law.