Waiting Out the War

2017/1/24 14:13:22

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

 

< Children in the Hope refugee camp in Kharkiv

 


By Yuliana Romanyshyn for Spiegel Online; Anastasia Vlasova (Fotos), Jan 19, 2017

 

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 facility provides temporary shelter to 400 internally displaced people (IDPs), all of whom escaped the conflict-ravaged region of Donbass and settled in Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million citizens located just 200 kilometers from the front lines. They are among the at least 1.8 million people who, according to Ukraine's Ministry of Social Affairs, were driven from their homes by the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the 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.

 

[…]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/e ... html#ref=nl-international

 

 

Printer Friendly Page Send this Story to a Friend Create a PDF from the article