91����

  | 05 July 2026

The ballistic missile and drone  on Kyiv on the night of 1 into 2 July 2026 killed 31 people, injured 102 and destroyed or damaged numerous buildings, including apartment buildings. Among the 25 ballistic missiles and 12 attack drones that reached their targets was one that hit the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), blowing out windows and doors in the early hours of 2 June.

This was the second attack on KSE in 38 days and the 80th since 2022 – the first 39 having been documented by the 91���� (91����)’s 2024 Education Under Attack report (which covered 2022 to 2023) and 40 are reported on in the Education Under Attack 2026 report, which covered 2024 and 2025, published last month.

The attacks on Ukrainian universities were almost 10% of the 377 attacks on universities covered by Education Under Attack. In addition to university buildings being destroyed or damaged, in the period covered by Education Under Attack 570 students or staff were killed, injured or abducted, while some 2,380 were either detained or arrested by state security forces.

As is the case for each of these attacks, behind the attacks on KSE are institutional and personal stories.

In addition to blowing out some windows and doors, and damaging the façade of KSE’s main building, named for the Dragon Capital investment company, the attack on the night of 23 into 24 May damaged the university’s generator, which was quickly replaced the next morning so that the “Welcome Day” event could go ahead as planned that morning, Sunday 24 May.

When the air-raid sirens began wailing, the 10 to 20 students that were in the Dragon Capital Building to watch the Ukrainian kickboxer Oleksandr Usyk’s fight with the Dutchman Rico Verhoeven rushed to the bomb shelters in the building’s basement, Tymofii Brik, KSE’s rector, told University World News in an email.

During the attack, the apartment of Rebecca Borsseau, a Canadian-American member of KSE’s engineering faculty, was destroyed.

Hours after the most recent assault on KSE on the night of 1 and 2 July, Timofey Mylovanov, the university’s president, : “Our KSE was damaged again. No one was hurt, we were lucky. It’s okay, we’ll recover. This time the damage is less, and the operations team has been repairing and restoring since 7 am. We’re not stopping the training.”

“Compared with the attack a few weeks earlier, this time KSE got off relatively lightly,” said Anton Liagusha, academic director of the Masters Programme in Memory Studies and Public History programme.*

“What’s more important than some panes of glass and door frames being destroyed,” he said, “is the knowing that again the Russians were aiming for us. Missiles and drones are targeted, and twice now in a few weeks they put in the coordinates of Ukraine’s only private university, and one with deep ties to the US, into their drones and missiles.”

He noted: “We never thought we were invulnerable. Prepared, yes, as evidenced by the bomb shelters. But knowing you’ve been targeted is a different feeling; it’s more than eerie. The morning after the attack, the students came back to campus and went to their classes and proceeded to learn.”

On that night, after receiving the warning of incoming Russian missiles and drones, while his wife and daughter went to a nearby subway station to take shelter, Oleksandr Domashenko, a student in the “War and Public Memory” course this author is teaching via Zoom, decided to stay in their apartment to work on assignments.

This seemingly irrational decision was, in fact, testimony that remaining engaged in their university studies forms “a lifeline that keeps us sane,” Domashenko explained. Several of his classmates who sought shelter in the subways spent that same night conducting surveys and interviews for their sociology assignments.

Following the “rule of two walls” (that is, putting at least two walls between yourself and the outside of the building), Domashenko went to the corridor outside his apartment to bed down for the duration.

As he had in the past, when he heard the sound of the incoming missiles, he took a sleeping pill, which did not work, because missiles exploding during the night caused his building to shake.

In the morning, he could still see a thick column of smoke rising from about a kilometre away, indicating at least one missile struck a significant target nearby. This sleepless night added to a very heavy toll extracted by Russia’s war against Ukraine on civilians who suffered neither injuries nor loss of their homes, as scores did that night.

“Without living through it, it’s very hard to imagine how devastating it is to suffer such severe sleep deprivation,” Domashenko said. “When the morning comes, you have a metallic taste in your mouth. If you are prone to headaches, you have them. You are disorientated.

“If you sleep well, you are not conscious of it, but normally when you wake up, you build up your day, and then you follow it. But in this case [that is, in a sleep-deprived state], the map doesn’t exist. There is fog, and you go through this fog, occasionally, dedicating yourself to some occasional tasks.

“It is very hard to concentrate to memorise something,” Domashenko continued. “For instance, today I was preparing for the seminar [in my course] and there was this 15-minute film we were supposed to watch. Normally I would put it to 1x or 1.5 x [speed] and watch it through, and that’s it. This time I had to watch it three times the normal speed to get it. It was like it was beyond a language barrier.”

Massive hike in attacks on education

The total figure of 8,566 attacks at all levels of education reported in Education Under Attack is 40% higher than the total during the 2022 to 2023 reporting period reported in 2024. At least 10,600 school and university students, teachers, professors, and education personnel were harmed in the 24 months beginning 1 January 2024, an increase of 6% during the same reporting period.

In addition to the 377 attacks on universities and/or students and staff, in its latest report 91����, which covers 2024 and 2025, identified 1,912 instances of schools or universities being used for military purposes, mostly by insurgent forces, almost double the figure reported in 2024.

The 40% increase in attacks on schools and universities over the past two years is certainly an undercount, Felicity Pearce, 91���� senior researcher and lead research consultant, and lead author of Education Under Attack, told University World News.

“We have an increasing number of blind spots. There are a lot of areas where we have decreased humanitarian access. We have information blackouts and, I think, a lot of attacks aren’t getting reported. Accordingly, I think the increase is more than we’ve reported,” she said.

HE attacks by the state loom large

The attacks on higher education infrastructure and on students/staff can be divided into three broad categories: attacks by non-state actors, attacks by foreign state actors and the largest category, attacks by the state security forces against their own students, professors and universities.

Among the attacks on universities by non-state actors are several in Burkina Faso that occurred in late June and early July 2025. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, a terrorist group allied with Al Qaeda, attacked the University of Fada N’Gourma three times; once with an arson attack and another in which university security personnel were killed.

In India, an improvised explosive device detonated inside the office of a student organisation at Dhanamanjuri University in Imphal city, Manipur State, on 23 February 2024. Local news reports indicated the explosion killed one person and injured another.

Education Under Attack records seven attacks on higher education in Nigeria, including armed attacks on students both on campuses and while they were in transit.

In April 2024, gunmen abducted two students from Federal University Wukari in the country’s southeast, while less than two weeks later, armed gunmen killed one student in an attack on the communities around Plateau State University (in the centre of Nigeria).

Nine students were kidnapped in May when armed bandits attacked the Confluence University of Science and Technology in Okene (in the south-central part of the country.

Between 25 February and 18 March 2025, six students, four of whom were female, were kidnapped by armed gunmen attacking two different universities in Nigeria.

In Yemen, “91���� identified at least ten attacks on higher education in the 2024-2025 reporting period, in which at least 59 students or staff were reportedly abducted or arrested,” states Education Under Attack.

The largest kidnapping occurred on 19 September 2025 when Houthi rebels abducted 18 students, teachers, and administrative staff from Sana’a University (in the west central part of the country) because they refused to join Houthi-sponsored events.

Additionally, the report identified at least 63 cases in which universities were used by the paramilitary Houthis.

In addition to the obvious impact on a university of having its campus seized and used for military purposes – including counter-attacks by government forces – the seizure of universities undermines the very concept of a university in the public’s mind.

In an email with University World News, Dr Lotfi Bin Dahman, director of the International Relations Center (Yemen), and Dr Saeed Al-Amoudi, director of the Information Technology Center, at Hadhramout University in Yemen, wrote: “International human rights and education reports, including reports on the protection of education in conflict zones, have documented instances of educational facilities being used for military or paramilitary purposes in certain contexts in Yemen.

“Evidence suggests that this has contributed to declining confidence among local communities in the stability of universities, as well as lower enrolment rates in some affected areas.”

Infrastructure targeted by foreign forces

There are two conflicts in which foreign militaries are attacking university infrastructure and/or students and staff. Russia’s war against Ukraine and Israel’s on Hamas in Gaza following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2022, “show how a very organised, powerful military can inflict a lot of damage with organised weapons”, said Pierce.

According to Education Under Attack in 2024, the Israeli Defense Force undertook 27 attacks on higher education institutions in 2024, “the majority of which involved the use of explosive weapons and were attacks on higher education  in the Gaza Strip, while there were three attacks in the West Bank, two on universities and one on higher education students.” In 2025, the number had dropped to three.

However, cautioned Pierce, this drastic decline was a function of the fact that in 2025 “there were no universities left to attack in terms of attacks that we did report”.

By November 2025, according to the United Nations, notes the report, 95% of the 206 buildings on 38 campuses were “assessed [as] either destroyed or severely damaged by aerial bombardments and ground operations, although it was not clear how many of these attacks occurred during 91����’s current reporting period.”

As University World Newsin June, a report published by Friends of Palestinian Universities concludes that since October 2023 Israel has carried out “systematic destruction of Gaza’s higher education sector”.

In 2024 and 2025, the Russians attacked schools 900 times and university campuses 40 times. Most of the attacks on universities were carried out by drones, which mirrors the growth in the use of drones by both Russia and Ukraine in 2024 and 2025.

The majority of the attacks were against universities in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Kherson, and Sumy regions. As  last September, twice in the previous month the University of Sumy was attacked with Kaliber cruise missiles, one of which all but destroyed the university’s library.

Even though KSE’s bomb shelters have mirror classrooms that students have learnt to orderly move to, “the quality of education is impacted”, said Domashenko. And not least of all because students cannot help but check their cell phones to determine if the missiles or drones are heading toward where their loved ones are.

Still, explained Ihor Shpylka, another of this author’s students, while Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces “can destroy my life and the lives of most of the people in my country, the least they and we can do is continue to work and study.”

Shpylka’s words are not youthful academic bravado.

Rather, as explained by Dr Pavlo Fedorchenko-Kutuev, who taught sociology at a university for decades and is now a leading research fellow of sociology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ukraine’s university-aged population is “conscientious about their mission in society”, including what he called “their biological mission” to have children so that the country’s population does not contract.

According to Fedorchenko-Kutuev, Russia’s attacks on universities are designed not just to kill and render buildings unusable. Their main purpose is to try to wipe out the cultural/intellectual idea of there even being a Ukraine.

For example, he noted, that on the night of 14-15 June, when the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex was badly damaged, the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio (ODNFS) was also destroyed; the Lavra included a cave dug by St Anthony of Kyiv, who founded the monastic tradition in what became Ukraine, almost a millennium ago.

The Lavra was one target of a broader attack involving 70 missiles and 611 drones that also targeted other cultural installations around the country and killed 11 people while wounding 53.

Fedorchenko-Kutuev explained the cultural patrimony that was lost by the destruction of the ODNFS. “They had a collection of movie costumes dating back 100 years. It’s an incredible loss and cannot be repaired.”

Among the costumes destroyed were those for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), which casts the 1905 mutiny on the Potemkin as a harbinger of the Russian Revolution that brought the Soviets to power; key scenes occur in the Ukrainian city of Odessa.

After noting that Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s universities are part of Putin’s drive to “destro[y] Ukrainian identity, the recognition of a distinct history, distinct people, a distinct culture”, in an interview with University World News, Robert Quinn, executive director of , explained the significance of keeping the universities running.

“Keeping a functioning university system going during this war is essentially saying, ‘We’re working on our future, and we are going to have a future’.”

While some might argue that ‘Higher education is not a luxury that we can afford right now; we’ve got to put everything into the war,’ they’re [the Ukrainians] not saying that. They’re saying: ‘We expect to get to the other side of this tunnel, and we’re going to have a bright future, and it’s going to be looking towards information and ideas’,” he said.

Students attacked by state forces

By far the largest category in Under Attack includes universities and students that have been attacked by either the police, state security forces or the military of their own countries.

CGPEA documented 16 attacks by Kenyan police on universities across the country over the 2024 to 2025 reporting period.

On 6 June 2024, for example, police used tear gas and live ammunition at the Rift Valley Institute of Science and Technology to break up a demonstration by students protesting against the institute’s administration.

On 8 October 2024, a female student was killed at Bungoma National Polytechnic “when police fired live rounds at students who were protesting the administration of the Polytechnic”, according to Education Under Attack. On September 3, 2025, police “used tear gas to disperse medical students at the University of Nairobi who were protesting at the medical campus against exam-related issues that were affecting their progression”, noted the report.

Indian universities and scholars were attacked by state authorities 154 times over the two-year reporting period. Among these attacks was one in January 2024 at Periyar University where police detained approximately 150 students who were protesting against a visit by the state governor, while in June in Delhi, police arrested some 50 students protesting the University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test.

A month later, “police reportedly beat and detained around 15 students during a protest at Osmania University, Hyderabad city”, states the report.

More than 240 students were arrested, detained and/or subjected to baton-wielding security forces in 2025.

Though the scale of violence against Indian universities by the Indian state was much less than that of Russia against Ukraine’s universities, in many instances the driver of the violence was similar. In India, for example, military violence against universities is “combat over what are legitimate identities that are Indian” as understood by the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said Quinn.

Isolated attacks increased

The 2024 Education Under Attack listed 51 countries, including France, Italy, the United States and Morocco, as having “isolated reports of attacks on education or that experienced attacks on education but were not conflict-affected”.

In the latest report, that number had grown to 55, with the addition of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal.

In each case, the additions as well as the Western countries that remained on this list did so because of “attacks on higher education students and education personnel related to pro-Palestinian protests”.

Among CGPEA’s recommendations are the criminalisation of the military use of schools or universities by both national militaries and irregular forces; the operationalisation of the “UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education’s “right to be safe in education” by ensuring learners, educators, staff, and facilities are protected from physical and psychological harm during internal security operations and periods of insecurity”; and the updating of military manuals and rules of engagement to explicitly “prohibit targeting educational facilities” by drones; given the precision of modern drones, any strike on a school should be investigated as a potential deliberate violation of the principle of distinction.”

Additionally, CGPEA calls for more countries to sign the Safe Schools Declaration (SSD), which is part of UNESCO’s Safe School Initiative launched in 2014, which focuses on preventing education from armed conflict. The SSD is presently endorsed by 122 countries; the three most recent signatories, including the United States, signed it in 2024.

The SSD has had some impact, notes Under Attack: “During the reporting period, the Secretary-General [of UNESCO] removed the situations of Iraq, Pakistan and the Philippines from the reports to the Security Council on Children and Armed Conflict as a result of a decrease in grave violations and the adoption, by the respective governments, of measures to protect children.”

According to Quinn, the SSD is the step that comes after casting a light on violent abuses of students, teachers and professors, and attacks on educational institutions.

“Just casting light isn’t enough, but it is the first step. 91���� has been very effective with the Safe Schools Declaration, getting, at this point, most of the countries in the world to have signed on to the assertion that schools and universities should be free from military occupation and attack,” he said before switching to an American football metaphor.

“We’re halfway down the field. The problem is the middle part isn’t the hard part. Getting to the end goal is the hardest part, and that’s where we actually have to see much more improvement on the ground.

“I never imagined that we could eliminate all attacks in 10 years,” said Quinn. “But I think we’ve made huge strides in moving the ball downfield so that now we are very consciously, as a community in the higher ed space, actively setting a global academic freedom agenda with the objective of reducing the number of attacks and increasing the zones of freedom.”