Ukraine’s homefront: People fill void left by overwhelmed government

When Olena Danylenko saw the unsmiling older woman approaching her outside the Lviv shelter where she now lives, her thoughts filled with the stories she’d heard of Ukrainians tiring of refugees.

“I feared she might say, ‘Why are you here disturbing my peaceful neighborhood?’” says Ms. Danylenko, who in May left her home in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region – two daughters, a granddaughter, and a dog in tow – after a bomb blast left her with three broken ribs.

Instead, the woman said she knew that families displaced by the war lived in the building, and she invited Ms. Danylenko to her nearby home to see if anything among her possessions could be of use.

“I was so grateful,” she says. “What I have found is that the citizens of this city are very supportive of us” – meaning, she explains, of her fellow Ukrainians who have been uprooted and most affected by the grinding war.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its seventh month, and with the government focused on fighting what has become a war of attrition, the country is finding its ability to feed, house, educate, and find employment for millions of Ukrainian internally displaced persons (IDPs) under tremendous stress.

To the rescue have come large numbers of private citizens who find themselves in less threatening and even quite normal living conditions, yet feel compelled to do something to ease the challenges of less fortunate people.

“We are all affected by this war, but for me it’s about solidarity with others who are facing the deepest hardships,” says Tetiana Mochevynska, administrator of the Lviv Feminist Workshop’s shelter where Ms. Danylenko and her family live.

A university student in this relatively unscathed city, Ms. Mochevynska says the knowledge that millions of her fellow Ukrainians – primarily women and children – were homeless, jobless, and torn from schools and familiar surroundings has made it impossible for her to “carry on as if life was normal.”

The United Nations estimates that more than 10 million Ukrainians of a prewar population of 44 million have been forced from their homes, mostly from the east where the fighting is most intense. UNICEF estimates that as many as 5 million are children.

And while several million have fled to neighboring European countries and beyond, an estimated 7 million – like Ms. Danylenko – have chosen to remain in Ukraine, often seeking refuge in the relatively safe western part of the country.

If anything, the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration estimated last week, the number of IDPs is growing.

Government advice: Seek safety

Two recent factors that are adding to their ranks: Thousands of refugees who fled Ukraine early in the war are opting to return, but not necessarily to the homes they left; and the government continues to advise residents of the hottest battle zones to leave for safer areas.

On July 31 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used a televised address to order civilians still living in the eastern Donetsk region to evacuate. “The more people leave Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian army will have time to kill,” he said.

More recently, the government advised citizens living in Ukraine-controlled areas of the Kherson region to seek safety, in anticipation of the counteroffensive launched late last month against Russian occupying forces.

On Sept. 7, Ukraine called for the residents of Russian-occupied areas around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to evacuate for their own safety.

With public services overwhelmed, Ukrainians like Ms. Mochevynska have stepped up.

“When you see so many families in difficulty, you want to try to be helpful where you can,” says Ms. Mochevynska, a political science major at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University. She started volunteering at the Feminist Workshop in March, and when the shelter was created in June, she was named its administrator.

How can Ukrainians help each other, she adds, “if I don’t do what I can?”

By helping others, she helps herself

This wartime compassion is evident across Ukraine.

In Mykolaiv, a southern port much closer to the front lines, Maria Kuldrinska says she was motivated to help by a sense of duty – and her own personal tragedy.

“This war shows us that there are no east or west Ukrainian people. We are all Ukrainians paying a price for our country,” she says.

A family doctor who lost her soldier husband in the early intense fighting for her city, she says it was perhaps those two factors that drove her need to assist those most disrupted by the war.

She now helps run a community pantry organized by Niko Volunteers, a Mykolaiv charitable organization. It’s an activity she says helps others, but which she has found has been of great assistance to her as well.

“I realized that by volunteering my brain stopped thinking about my own pain,” she says, surrounded by the packages of diapers and other household necessities the pantry hands out. “I am too busy for that when I am thinking about everybody else.”

Volunteers like Ms. Mochevynska and Dr. Kuldrinska acknowledge that all the private initiatives that have sprung up, when combined with the government’s efforts, have been unable to meet the substantial needs of IDPs.

The government provides displaced families with a monthly stipend of about $100, but officials recognize that is insufficient for both food and a place to live. Last month Vitaly Muzychenko, the deputy minister of social policy for Ukraine, told journalists the government was not prepared “for such a scale of displaced persons.”

A human face

Most Ukrainians are aware of the staggering numbers of IDPs, but occasionally a story dominates the media that puts a human face on the war’s toll.

In July, the country learned of the tragic end of Anna Protsenko, a young woman who had followed government orders and evacuated her village, Pokrovsk, in Donetsk. The train that carried her westward was free, but soon what little money she had ran out and she was unable to find work. Feeling defeated, her family recounted, she moved back home. Just two days later, a Russian rocket killed her.

Such stories sadden Dr. Kuldrinska, but she says they also stiffen her resolve to keep serving her fellow Ukrainians. And especially, she adds, when she senses that some Ukrainians are losing their early fervor to help others and focusing more on their own lives.

Citing what she describes as “something like a domestic version” of donor fatigue, she notes that the regular volunteers at her pantry have dwindled from more than 100 when Mykolaiv was under intense attack to a core group of about 15 today.

Yet even as some Ukrainians may be tiring of their fellow citizens’ overwhelming needs, others report something very different – a war-forged solidarity and a newfound enthusiasm for addressing in innovative ways national needs laid bare by the war, such as in education and housing.

“What this war has shown us is that if we will not support each other, then we could not exist,” says Phillip Solodovnichenko, an educator working with the Odesa nonprofit Prozori to improve online education.

The group’s immediate task is to help the government educate all of the country’s children despite the war, he says. In the short term, his focus is on bringing online English classes and environmental studies to more students.

At the same time, he adds, Ukraine needs to use the shake-up in thinking the war has caused to build a better education system responding to today’s needs.

“Many of us now see that we need to do things in new ways,” Mr. Solodovnichenko says. “We can become a better country out of this,” he adds, “but we realize that if we don’t change, this war will have had no meaning.”

Rethinking the meaning of “home”

That thinking finds an echo in Marta Buriak, an urban planner in Lviv. The Rubber City nonprofit group she directs is using the challenge of housing displaced families as a way of developing innovative housing options for the country more broadly.

“We have this immediate need to house the growing population of IDPs, but in Ukraine we also need to change how people think about ‘home,’” she says.

Noting that for most Ukrainians “home” is something owned, not rented, and is meant for one family and not the kind of communal habitat Rubber City aims to develop, she says a change in thinking can start with the IDPs.

“The main question we are asking is how to make a home – not a shelter, but a home – for families from different parts of our country,” says Ms. Buriak, referring to the pilot project her group is developing in a building on Lviv’s outskirts.

“Home is more than four walls and a place for sleeping, it is really about people building a sense of community together,” she says. For IDPs that means “finding common language with people in a new city,” she says.

The first step may indeed be answering a specific need of the war’s displaced people. “But if we can develop new ways of thinking about what ‘home’ is,” she adds, “that will be something good for all Ukraine.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.