Photographs by Jedrzej Nowicki

In a town called Staryi Saltiv, in northeastern Ukraine, many buildings lie in ruins after years of war, but only one has been demolished twice: the district school. Russian missiles leveled it in early 2022. The town gradually raised the money not just to reconstruct it but to enlarge and improve it, adding new facilities for disabled children. Then, just days after the work was completed in early May, the Russians sent five Shahed drones into it, leaving it a burned-out ruin.

“We don’t know why,” Iryna Glazunova, the town’s director of education and culture, told me. “I think the overall point is to destroy Ukraine.”

Now an enormous, colorful banner draped over the wreckage reads WE WILL CONTINUE ANYWAY.

They will continue in a reinforced-concrete bunke

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