It is perhaps unnecessary to say that this summer has been a hellishly difficult one for Ukraine. The intensification of Russian bombardments, combined with the continuing worsening battlefield situation, in tandem with the torturous experience of watching the country’s fate being discussed and deliberated from miles away, continually with no meaningful results, has taken its toll on everyone.
In amongst this stress, we have continued our work as best we can. Whilst the situation in the villages we have grown so attached to in Kharkiv Oblast has remained too dangerous for us to work there, we have worked to expand our programme supporting internally displaced people (IDPs) with home repairs. Some of the families we have been working with this summer have included Oksana and her young son Dima, from Novopavlivka, who used all their savings to buy a small, half-finished cottage in Cherkasy Oblast for $1,000 – a cottage complete with a roof and walls, but lacking a floor; Tamara and her husband and parents, also from Novopavlivka, who evacuated to a cottage in the west of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which they bought for a few thousand dollars, and which, whilst generally liveable in, is entirely unsuitable for the needs of her elderly parents, who are mostly bedbound, and for whom we have bought new mattresses as well as refurbishing what was a crumbling and inaccessible bathroom. For Nastya, a young mother from Avdiivka (a city flattened and occupied last year by Russian forces), now also living in the west of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, we have repaired her entire heating system, to ensure that she, her toddler son, her teenage brother, and the baby she has on the way, will be able to live out the winter, whilst her husband continues to serve on the front. For several other families, we have funded the digging of wells in their garden, and the repair of mains water supplies, as many cottages in rural areas of central Ukraine are still without running water. The work we are doing is simple and practical, ensuring that those who leave seeking safety are able to survive in comfort and warmth. The workload is enormous, not least due to the geographical scale given that these families are spread throughout the whole of Ukraine. Nonetheless, we are slowly but surely making our way through the approximately 500 requests for support from households in similar situations which we have received – but this is only possible with your help.
The intensification of fighting in Donetsk Oblast, and Russian advances in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, have meant that this new wave of IDPs is growing every day, and with it a new housing crisis is emerging in Ukraine. Where at the start of summer, the problem was finding somewhere affordable to rent or buy, the problem now is finding anything at all, with prices sky-rocketing. Over the summer, we partnered with the Dnipro Centre for Contemporary Culture and ran a fundraiser for €10,000, with which we plan to buy a cottage for an IDP family, which, with your help, we hope to renovate. We are already on the lookout for the perfect cottage, as well as working closely with the Novopavlivka village administration to identify the most appropriate family. We hope very much that this will be the beginning of a larger programme of assistance with resettlement for families from frontline territories.
Alongside this work, our other expenses this summer have included the repair of windows for an IDP family from occupied territories, now living in Kyiv, whose apartment was severely damaged during one of the numerous attacks over the past few months, as well as continuing to provide energy support for communities across the east of the country.
As this strange and painful summer comes to a close, we want to thank you all once again for remaining with us, and with Ukraine. It can feel like a struggle at times to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we continue to work with the understanding that we do not have the right to despair, only to support as best we can. Together, with your invaluable help, we continue to make a real, practical difference to people’s daily existence in the harshest of circumstances. We also want to extend our gratitude to the Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast, as well as the Knowles family, for their promotion of our work as part of a fundraiser in memory of David, the founder and host of the podcast who passed away last year.
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