You're reading: Waiting Out War: Kharkiv shelter residents already living years in ‘temporary’ homes

Editor’s Note: The story was investigated as part of New Diplomacy’s Eastern Partnership Journalism Fellowship with Spiegel Online, which published the story first. See kyivpost.com for full version.

KHARKIV, Ukraine –- Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people, forcing them to flee from constant shelling. Many of them have since found shelter, but they are yearning to return to their old lives.

Over a dozen gray metal containers, interlaced with paths and power lines, sit on the outskirts of Kharkiv. The sound of children’s laughter rises from a playground in the fenced-in compound. “Transit Modular Housing Nadiya,” reads a sign on one of the containers. Nadiya means “hope” in Ukrainian.

At capacity, the center provides temporary shelter to 400 internally displaced people, all of whom escaped the war-ravaged Donbas and settled in Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million citizens located just 200 kilometers from the war front. They are among at least 1.8 million people who, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Affairs, were driven from their homes by Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

Some of the displaced applied for asylum in the European Union, fled abroad or moved to Russia. But a huge number of them sought shelter elsewhere in Ukraine, making the country’s domestic refugee crisis one of the largest seen in Europe since the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 2001. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the number of internally displaced people in Ukraine places the country in the top 10 worldwide.

Family flees

Olena Churina and her nine children are among those living at the Hope shelter. Her story is similar to those of many of her fellow Ukrainians: The family fled their home to escape the constant shelling, expecting to be back within weeks. But despite the Minsk II ceasefire being agreed between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany in February 2015, the shelling still hasn’t stopped – and the internally displaced have been away from their homes since the summer of 2014.

Churina fled from the village of Hlafirivka, located in Luhansk Oblast some 60 kilometers from the border with Russia. Today, her hometown, as is the case for everyone living in the “Hope” shelter, is occupied by Russian-backed separatists. Moreover, her house is likely damaged beyond repair or looted – and Churina, with her husband having decided to return to Luhansk to live with his father, is raising her nine children, aged two to 19, all by herself.

When the war began in April 2014, she had hoped it wouldn’t be long before things quietened down again. But they didn’t. The constant explosions meant that soon, any loud noise was enough to terrify her children. After five months of waiting, she decided to leave.

“We had Ukrainian troops on one side and Russians on the other,” she recalls. “And we were in the middle.”

The family owned a three-room home in the village along with some land for farming, a garden and two cows. For the last year in the shelter, though, the family of 10 has been crammed into a space measuring just 24 square meters (260 square feet). “I ask them: ‘Do you want to go back?’” she says, referring to her children. “They tell me: ‘No, there is a war.’”

Olena Churina sits with five of her nine children inside their apartment in the Hope shelter in Kharkiv.

Olena Churina sits with five of her nine children inside their apartment in the Hope shelter in Kharkiv. (Anastasia Vlasova)

Waiting list

The Hope shelter in Kharkiv is one of seven similar projects financed by the German government and built by the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ). In total, Berlin has invested 19 million euros in the hostels, which provide home to some 2,300 internally displaced persons in Ukraine.

Hope consists of 10 metal containers for apartment housing and three additional dormitory containers divided into dozens of cubicles. There are also several administration modules. All the buildings are supplied with water and electrical heating.

Churina’s family occupies one of the apartment containers, which is equipped with one bathroom, a tiny kitchen and a single room; at night, the 10-person family squeezes into seven bunk beds. Still, having hot water from the tap was a step up: Back in Hlafirivka they had no running water in the house at all.

The shelter compound is secured with a fence and equipped with round-the-clock surveillance cameras so Churina doesn’t have to worry about her children walking to the playground alone. The camp has three full-time staff members in addition to volunteers from the Red Cross and the United Nations Refugee Agency, who visit the shelter and entertain the children. A pediatrician visits the hostel twice a week and consultations are free of charge.

The boarding isn’t entirely free, however, with adults required to pay Hr 350 (12 euros) and children Hr 175 (6 euros) per month to cover utilities. That money comes out of the Hr 900 (around 30 euros) she receives in government assistance for displaced persons in addition to further assistance she gets as a single mother of several children.

Although Hope inhabitants complain about excessive heat during summer, the absence of air conditioning, the tight space and the high utility fees, there are plenty of people who would like a spot in the modular housing. The manager of Hope, Svitlana Chuprina, says that around 1,500 IDPs are still waiting for a vacant room in Kharkiv.

Mop chief

Ayshat Natarova, 56, a former resident of Stanytsya Luhanska, clearly recalls the shells flying over her house. She even still keeps a bomb fragment that ended up on the pillow of a bed after crashing through a window. “Luckily, no one was lying there at the time,” she says, showing the heavy shard of metal.

Her house had been freshly renovated just before it happened. She remembers the shells exploding in her yard with shrapnel piercing one side of her house. What wasn’t destroyed by the shelling was stolen by looters, she adds.

Most inhabitants of the Hope shelter rely on government assistance, but Natarova doesn’t like sitting idly. Instead, she has found a job as a housekeeper in the shelter. “I am a mop chief,” she says. “I am satisfied with everything, because if children feel good, I feel good too.”

New life

Unlike the others, Iryna Olyunina – from the city of Horlivka in Donetsk Oblast – lives in a 12-square-meter room in a dormitory container. She shares a kitchen with 12 other families but has her own bathroom.

She fled Donbas on the last train out of the city, with 14 people crammed into a single compartment, although she didn’t realize at the time that train service would be cut off. A half-year later, she was living in the shelter. “It was pure happiness to get here, like heaven on earth,” she says.

Olyunina is one of the lucky ones. Her apartment on the outskirts of Horlivka has been untouched by the violence and relatives even stop by to water her plants. Olyunina, though, is afraid of returning to Donbas. “It is much quieter to live in a hostel. Back home, you had to turn up your television to drown out the shelling,” she says. Her hometown currently straddles the front lines.

In her new life, Olyunina is slowly realizing a dream of her youth – designing fashion. Ever since she was 20, she has wanted to start a fashion studio and create her own line of clothing. Recently, volunteers gave her a sewing machine and now, Olyunina works as a dressmaker at Hope.

“We live and are happy here, satisfied with everything,” she says.