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With UN support, charity gives new homes to victims of war

Yevhen Kaplin, the coordinator with the Proliska charity, looks over a ruined house with local resident Stefania Kutsenko in the town of Zaitseve on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

ZAITSEVE, BAKHMUT and CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — Yevhen Kaplin, the 30-year-old coordinator of the Proliska charity, drives a white Mitsubishi pickup on a winding dirt road in the war zone of Donbas, passing one poor country house after another under the hot sun.

Many of the homes have been badly damaged by shelling and the cross-fire between Russian-backed forces and Ukrainian ones. This is Zaitseve, a town of 3,000 people some 580 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. It is cut in half by the frozen frontline of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Kaplin finally parks at a mazanka — a poorly built mud-walled hut — and opens the car’s back seats to a haggard-looking man in his late 30s carrying a little blonde girl in his arms. They are Maskym Pasechnykov, a local civilian, and his 3-year-old daughter Anastasiya.

Soon they will leave this embattled town: They were lucky to be approved for a new, safe home at no cost to them, with funds provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or UNHCR.

Since early 2019, the UN has run the world’s only pilot project to purchase housing for people who have lost their homes and properties in the hostilities in eastern Ukraine. Without this help, these people are likely doomed to extreme poverty and the constant threat of lethal danger in the war-ravaged wastelands of Donbas.

By the end of 2019, 20 grantees — mostly destitute large families and lone elderly people — will get a chance to resettle in peaceful Ukrainian-controlled areas of the region as part of the program. The move will allow the children to finally get back to schools, the adults find better jobs and return to normal life, and the elderly to have access to medical care and social benefits.

In this mission, Kaplin and his charity organization, as an official UN partner since 2016, is assigned an uneasy and sometimes morally tough job — to nominate and assist those few lucky people among the thousands of suffering families living all along the 450-kilometers frontline.

Maksym Pasechnykov and his daughter Anastasiya are locking their house in the town of Zaitseve on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

Single dad

As the few locals who still live there hear the car engine roar, they step out onto the grass-and-dust lane from behind rusty fences pockmarked from Grad rocket shrapnel. For many of them, this white pickup brings a good hope for a better future.

“The people we work with here, they basically have nowhere else to go,” Kaplin says. “Children, women, elderly people… No one needs them, and this is something that is not going to change.”

Kaplin’s pickup rolls on to bring Pasechnykov and his daughter to the town of Chasiv Yar some 20 kilometers deeper into the peaceful area: There, Proliska has found three potentially suitable single-story houses for sale.

The houses are hardly palaces: they were built decades ago and, usually, are not fully renovated or furnished. In some cases, people try to sell Proliska mud huts without sewage systems or public utilities, which the organization rejects.

Unfortunately, the budget is not bottomless: the UN allocates up to $5,000 for a house or an apartment — that’s including the cost of all the paperwork. So Kaplin and his fellow activists must constantly find a delicate balance between quality and cost.

Maksym Pasechnykov and his daughter Anastasiya, the civilian residents of the town of Zaitseve, are riding in a car to choose their new house for purchase on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

Pasechnykov’s tired eyes are shining with happiness in any house he examines — this is basically his only chance to improve his family’s life. Besides his daughter, he is also raising his 4-year-old son, Maksym.

Both of his children have disabilities — Anastasiya has diabetes and needs regular insulin injections. Maksym suffers from a clubfoot, although his condition is being gradually corrected through regular, difficult procedures.

Pasechnykov is a single dad. The kids’ mother cut loose from the family to live with soldiers in their barracks a while ago.

“If we move, I’ll be able to get a better job here or in a nearby city,” Pasechnykov says.

“Back in Zaitseve, I’m working as a night watchman at a local farm — in fact, that’s the only job I can take since I have to be with the kids all day long. And my salary, even with their disability pensions included, is hardly enough to survive. But here in this town, they can attend the local kindergarten with enhanced medical care, and I’ll get a normal full-time day job.”

“Things seem getting better now at last,” he smiles.

Eventually he happily decides on a small but cozy house in the town’s inner suburbs — although Kaplin and his assistants now must bargain with the house’s owner, who suddenly decided to inflate the price.

Maksym Pasechnykov and his daughter Anastasiya are playing in a toy house at the Proliska charity headquarters in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

Top priority

The long day behind the wheel continues: Two more beneficiaries are waiting.

Since the start of the program in February, 11 candidate families proposed by Proliska have been approved by the UN. Three of them have already received their new homes and moved in, and three more are in the process.

According to the program’s rules, all beneficiaries become full-fledged owners of their new houses — although they can’t resell them for five years.

“Of course, families with children are our top priority,” Kaplin explains as his pickup pulls out onto a rough highway leading to the city of Bakhmut. “Because, you know, that’s kids. Many of them attend schools located beyond the forward military strongpoints.”

In other words, the children must cross the frontline in order to receive an education. And they are often the lucky ones.

“In some locations, children have no access to education at all. Last week, we visited the village of Lobacheve (in Luhansk Oblast, 580 kilometers southeast of Kyiv). There’s a family living there right in front of a ferry stop across the Siverskiy Donets River, which marks the contact line,” Kaplin says.

“Just 20 meters away from their house across the river is a dugout of (Russian-backed forces). There is no school in Lobacheve, and no school bus ever makes it there. The only way for a local kid is to be sent to the residential school in (the town of) Noviy Aidar (35 kilometers away), while his parents go on living in Lobacheve. The family gets separated.”

Yevhen Kaplin, the coordinator with the Proliska charity, and his aide Anastasiya Yegorova, are having a rest at the organization’s headquarters in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

In other words, the children must cross the frontline in order to receive an education. And they are often the lucky ones.

“In some locations, children have no access to education at all. Last week, we visited the village of Lobacheve (in Luhansk Oblast, 580 kilometers southeast of Kyiv). There’s a family living there right in front of a ferry stop across the Siverskiy Donets River, which marks the contact line,” Kaplin says.

“Just 20 meters away from their house across the river is a dugout of (Russian-backed forces).

“There is no school in Lobacheve, and no school bus ever makes it there. The only way for a local kid is to be sent to the residential school in (the town of) Noviy Aidar (35 kilometers away), while his parents go on living in Lobacheve. The family gets separated.”

Endless war

Since spring 2014, Russia’s war in Donbas has claimed at least 13,000 lives — including those of over 3,300 civilians — and left nearly 30,000 injured, the UN estimates. According to the Ukrainian authorities, the conflict has inflicted at least Hr 13 billion ($490 million) worth of material losses on the country. But that figure is hardly convincing, given the scale of the destruction in the war zone.

And with no end in sight to the five-year war, a stalemate of grueling low-level warfare is guaranteed to continue sowing human misery.

For the UN and its partner organizations working in Donbas, this experimental project is a blunt solution: in many ways, buying housing and resettling families proves cheaper and more effective than spending endless resources on repairing their houses in the warzone, only to see them damaged again in the next flare-up of hostilities.

Anti-tank barrier fields, pictured near the town of Zaitseve in Donetsk Oblast on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

“Various charities have spent millions on renovations for civilians here in Donbas,” Kaplin says.

“But there can be no guarantee another shell won’t hit a repaired house soon. We’ve had enough such cases — we give building materials to repair a house and, the next day, it gets smashed, just like that. Every day, it comes and goes: We give windows sheets, and the next day a grenade flies in through a window. Again 20 families call and ask for help because it’s cold outside. We bring new supplies, and then an incendiary bullet burns our window sheets out — and people need help, again and again.”

But purchasing full accommodations far behind the frontline means solving the bulk of hardships for a needy family.

“They are normally afraid to abandon their properties due to the threat of having their own houses looted, occupied by the military, or ruined,” Kaplin continues.

“But even though 80 percent of affected civilians flee sooner or later, many of them face the unpleasant experience of having to move frequently between a series of rented apartments or even living at train stations. Eventually, they often go back to their old houses in the war zone.”

The pilot project aims to end all these troubles. It sets the arduous task of finding inexpensive, but decent housing with access to all basic utilities and services in towns with public transport and available medical care.

“A house should be ready to be moved into right away. A displaced person shouldn’t be forced to invest $10,000 more into repairs,” Kaplin says.

“Unfortunately, social housing offered by the local authorities often requires too much money for renovations — much more than buying a ready house.”

Stefania Kutsenko, a local elderly civilian who lost her home amid hostilities, smiles as she looks over a new house to be purchased for her in the city of Bakhmut on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

Facebook fundraising

Kaplin returns to Zaitseve once more, this time to give a ride to Stefania Kutsenko, a 70-year-old woman and another one of the program’s beneficiaries.

She lives alone in a temporary shelter generously given to her by acquaintances. Her own house, located even closer to the enemy lines, was totally ruined amid artillery duels between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed militants on the night of May 17–18, 2018. The fire following the artillery’s impact was so catastrophic that the house’s clay floor was literally melted away.

Until the December frosts, Kutsenko continued living in the household’s summer kitchen. But, eventually, the tiny hut was ruined and then looted.

Fortunately, Kutsenko was lucky enough to be approved for the UN program and Kaplin’s team has found a $4,000 house for her on the outskirts of the city of Bakhmut, which she gladly accepts.

This practice of buying new homes actually started long before the UN came to the rescue. Between 2015 and 2018, Proliska resettled 10 families in safe Donbas cities or other locations across the country — all thanks to fundraising on Facebook with the help of journalists reporting about civilian suffering in Donbas.

Yevhen Kaplin, the coordinator with the Proliska charity, laughs as he talks to a family recently resettled into the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

It all started with the Kovalchuk family, which was raising five kids in the city of Debaltseve.

In early 2015, during the devastating battle in the area, Kaplin and his friends were evacuating civilians by the dozens from the war zone. Meanwhile, eighteen members of the Kovalchuk family were hiding out in their basement, while tanks engaged in non-stop combat right next to their kitchen garden.

Kaplin wrote a post on Facebook desperately asking for help. Suddenly, a flood of donations started to come in from around the world. In two weeks, Proliska had managed to collect $3500 to resettle the family into a new home in Kharkiv Oblast.

Elated by this success, Kaplin continued fundraising — and soon another family, the Eminovs, was evacuated from the embattled hamlet of Zhovanka, part of Zaitseve. Their house was had been razed to the ground by shelling, and it took two days to dig the family out of their collapsed basement shelter.

It took just 24 hours to gather Hr 40,000 ($1,500) to buy them a house in Chasiv Yar.

“The Eminovs had nearly 20 sheep before the war,” Kaplin recalls as he twists the wheel holding another smoldering cigarette between his fingers.

“During the war, they had bred in large numbers. So we literally had to evacuate maybe 70 sheep together with the family. But that’s alright — we fundraised a house on Facebook, helped sell the sheep and repair their accommodation with that money. Now there’s almost nothing left of their old house here in Zhovanka.”

To this day, the Eminovs live happily in the peaceful quiet of Chasiv Yar.

Living on the road

In many ways, this experience helped Kaplin organize the resettlement program with international backing. The UN came very much in time — since approximately 2016, the torrent of donations for charitable causes has been gradually dwindling as humanitarian issues in Donbas slip from the public spotlight.

Now the Proliska charity, which runs 10 humanitarian centers all along the frontline with the help of nearly 100 volunteers and employees, relies heavily on UN support to go on helping the embattled civilians of Donbas.

Yevhen Kaplin, the coordinator with the Proliska charity, drives a car through a town in Donetsk Oblast on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

Even the white car that Kaplin drives on the job was leased to Proliska by the UNHCR. He spends 6 days a week traveling Donbas back and forth and tackling numerous humanitarian problems from Stanytsya Luhanska to Mariupol.

Another busy day in Donbas is almost done for him. Tomorrow there will be new candidates for resettlement and new attempts to find them a home.

“Somebody has to do this anyway,” Kaplin says as he turns his workhorse pickup into the nearest cheap hotel in Bakhmut.

To his left, the sunset blazes over the highway.

“In 2014, I had a naive hope that this war would end very soon. Now it’s been five years since I started living on the road here in Donbas. Everybody’s still waiting, but the war is not ending. So if we can’t bring peace to these people here, we can at least drag them out of this war.

“Human suffering must not last endlessly,” he says. “It’s as simple as that.”