Until early March, Mariia Rusanova, an architect and Ph.D. student at Ukraine’s Kharkiv National University of Civil Engi­neer­­ing and Architecture, lived comfortably in a city just a few miles from Russia. The window in her apartment looked out toward the border, and, one morning after the Russian invasion began on February 24, she awoke to the sound of bombs exploding. For a week afterward, she practically lived in her basement, before finally realizing the war would not end soon and deciding to flee into Poland with her brother and his family.

Kharkiv has been under relentless attack since the beginning of the invasion, and, beyond the tragic loss of life, the city’s heritage and cultural sites have been devastated. Parts of Rusanova’s university have been bombed, as has the Kharkiv School of Architecture (KhSA), which has now temporarily relocated to Ukraine’s National Academy of Arts in Lviv, 540 miles west.