Ksenia Golubytska will be the first to admit that starting a business was not quite the escape plan she imagined. “At that moment I was an English teacher and had been teaching a lot at university back in Donetsk where I’m from and a number of language schools,” she says. “At some point I got overwhelmed with teaching a lot – which I did being a workaholic – so I decided that I’d start my own language school and would not have to work anymore. A typical mistake of a newly made entrepreneur! Surprise, surprise – after I started Language Lab I had to work much more!”JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Ksenia Golubytska (Photo: Language Lab) That school, Language Lab, is now one of the more unusual educational institutions in Kyiv: a language school operating in a capital city at war, teaching Ukrainian to students online around the world. A new kind of student Before February 2022, the picture looked quite different. Foreigners moving to Kyiv who wanted to navigate daily life mostly chose to learn Russian. It was, as Golubytska puts it, the more practical option – widely understood across the region, and commonly used in the city itself. Then the full-scale invasion began, and almost overnight, that changed.