21 August 2026
(PHOTO: Collage by Intent)
On the night of August 21, Russian invaders carried out an airstrike on the dormitories of Kherson State University. The buildings sustained significant damage as a result of the strike.
This was reported by Oleksandr Spivakovsky, rector of Kherson State University.
According to him, a guided aerial bomb struck the university dormitory during the night. Not a single window in the buildings remained intact, and the shock wave was so powerful that walls inside the buildings were destroyed and virtually nothing survived.
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Spivakovsky emphasized that these were specifically student dormitories, which had once been bustling with life before the full-scale invasion.
“The barbarians, of course, will write and report in the news that a military facility has been destroyed. But these were student dorms, where life once thrived… until the Russians came to our land,” the rector wrote.
He called on the world to recognize the consequences of Russian strikes on Kherson’s civilian infrastructure.
The occupiers regularly strike buildings and dormitories at Kherson State University.
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In early August, following a strike by an enemy drone, a fire broke out in one of Kherson State University’s dormitories—the building’s rooms were gutted by the fire.
In February, the invaders attacked the university building four times in a single month, damaging the building’s windows, doors, and walls.
Despite the shelling, Kharkiv State University continues to operate—the university has relocated to Ivano-Frankivsk, where it is now based at Vasyl Stefanyk Carpathian National University.
As Spivakovsky explained in an interview with Intent, today—four years later—Kharkiv State University not only maintains its position among Ukraine’s leading universities but is also implementing innovations that are being adopted by educational institutions both in Ukraine and abroad.
Ірина Глухова