Ukraine’s other battle: Helping its thousands of displaced citizens

MOSCOW, Russia — Lidia Grigoriyevna sat in front of a bombed-out apartment building struggling to figure out what she’d do next.

She had fled heavy fighting near the rebel stronghold of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine earlier this summer. But the fighting followed the 79-year-old pensioner to the city of Popasna, roughly 35 miles to the west, which had come under shelling soon after.

Grigoriyevna, who has brittle, white hair and tired, melancholy eyes, had no way of finding out whether her apartment had been destroyed, she said, because she couldn’t make contact with her two grown children who’d stayed behind.

“What will I do in the winter?” she said in an interview earlier this month, fighting back tears.

Her story is a glimpse into the difficulties facing thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in eastern Ukraine, as well as those looming over a government largely unprepared for the magnitude of the challenge.

The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates that more than 155,000 people have been displaced within Ukraine since the fighting began last April.

While civic activists and ordinary citizens have chipped in to provide a range of logistical, legal and medical support, observers say government authorities must step up to the task of helping a growing number of IDPs.

“The influx of refugees from Donetsk and Luhansk continues, and though the Ukrainian government has recently taken some steps to provide assistance to displaced people, it should urgently intensify efforts to provide access to sustainable housing, social services, and other assistance,” said Tanya Lokshina, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The Ukrainian government faces a number of “logistical nightmares” in assisting IDPs, according to Oldrich Andrysek, UNHCR’s regional representative for Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.

They include arranging proper housing, restoring infrastructure and ensuring socio-economic welfare, among many other tasks.

“Some of these people haven’t received salaries or social security payments for months because the government system broke down when they lost effective control of the territories,” he said.

Grigoriyevna, the refugee from Luhansk, said she hadn’t received her pension since fighting there intensified.

Further complicating things, there is still no proper registration system in order for the displaced, Andrysek says.

Groups like Human Rights Watch and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are tracking the plight of displaced Ukrainians, including in the Luhansk region and its eponymous capital, where regular fighting has destroyed the most basic infrastructure.

Residents of Stanytsia-Luhanska say they haven’t had water and electricity since Aug. 2, according to an OSCE statement released Monday. The OSCE also said most local police and other officials are nowhere in sight.

Focus has increasingly turned to the city of Luhansk itself, now the scene of a fierce battle for control between rebels and Ukrainian forces that’s produced staggering civilian casualties and has ravaged local infrastructure.

Just last week, a convoy carrying refugees near the city was struck by rocket fire, killing dozens of people, including children.

Of those who manage to flee the fighting, many are stranded in temporary shelters. 

A displaced Ukrainian walks in a refugee camp near Donetsk on Aug. 18, 2014.

“The amount of resources they’re taking with them is minimized to what they can carry in a plastic bag,” Andrysek, of the UNHCR, said. “It’s getting cooler by the day and practically no one has warm clothing.”

All signs point to a long road ahead for both the Ukrainian military and ordinary citizens who remain caught in the crossfire of the conflict with pro-Russia separatists.

Ukrainian forces have largely surrounded the rebel stronghold of Donetsk and are currently fighting for control of central Luhansk. They face the major dilemma of keeping civilian casualties to a minimum amid potential close-quarter combat.

But that has been difficult, and eyewitness accounts from smaller cities recently liberated from rebel control help explain why.

Viktor Demidov, a 53-year-old businessman, was driving to work on July 21 in the city of Dzerzhinsk — about 25 miles north of Donetsk — when his car was peppered with bullets by unidentified men in camouflage, just as fighting broke out there between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces.

His right leg was badly injured. More than two weeks after fighting there died down, he still lay in a gritty local hospital with a half-dozen other civilians who were also caught in the fighting.

“Until then [July 21], we lived in a peaceful city,” he said in an interview from his hospital bed in early August. “Everyone went to work every day, and no one expected that on that day, our city would see a real-life battle on the streets, right in the center of town.”

So far, much of the fighting has involved both sides trading volleys of artillery and rocket fire. That’s made this conflict especially dangerous for civilians.

Lokshina, the Human Rights Watch researcher, says heavy shelling of residential neighborhoods — which both sides blame on the other — is complicating residents’ efforts to flee the fighting.

Plus, they don’t know what kind of assistance they’ll be able to get elsewhere, she added.

“Those we interviewed emphasized in particular that they would have left long ago if they had a place to go to and resources to rely on,” she says.