Life in limbo: Millions of people displaced inside Ukraine wait and hope
Not everyone displaced by the war has managed to leave the country
Tania Meleshchenko lives in hope. She hopes to one day be able to go home to Svatove, Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine.
More immediately, she hopes to make contact with her parents in the Russian-occupied town, located along the Krasna River.
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The former local water commission employee's wide grey eyes brimmed with tears as she described how she and her son were forced to flee alone at the end of August last year. They travelled almost 400 kilometres to reach the wide, smooth Dnipro River and the relative safety of the city of Dnipro.
'We are exhausted," Meleshchenko told CBC News at a shelter for internally displaced people, one of dozens in the city.
"My child at first asked me, why did the Russians invade us? What do I need to tell him? I don't know why Russia did such terrible things to us. My child asked me a really adult question but he is only eight years old.
"He asked me when we would come home. But I don't even have answers. I'm not sure if we still have a home."
Meleshchenko doesn't even know if she has a family to go back to. Her father was the local water commission manager; he and other municipal officials in the region were ordered to exchange their Ukrainian documents and passports for Russian ones. When he refused, he "disappeared" last spring for several days and eventually turned up alive in a pit near the town.
Meleshchenko has not spoken to her father or her mother — who could not leave home because of a medical condition — for more than five months.
"The only thing I want is to hear their voices," she said.
Her husband managed to escape and join them in Dnipro. Now reunited in the shelter, they have started to search for work and an apartment.
While much of the world's attention on Ukraine's refugee crisis remains focused on those who've fled to other nations, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) recently reported that 5.3 million Ukrainians are displaced within their own country because of the war.
Many of them, such as Meleshchenko, have fled only a few hundred kilometres and now wait anxiously in nearby cities for the fighting to end.
Unemployed and often living in shelters, they present a humanitarian crisis in the making as the war enters its second year. They also represent an economic crisis the Ukrainian government is struggling to address.
In a Jan. 23, 2023 report, the IOM said 70 per cent of those fleeing their homes who elected to remain in the country came from the eastern Donbas region. Of those surveyed by the IOM, 57 per cent said they might give up on returning home and simply relocate elsewhere in Ukraine. Others still are considering moving abroad.
The shelter housing Meleshchenko and her family — a clean, refurbished Soviet-era building — has seen almost 5,000 people come through its doors since it opened last spring, said Ihor Hanshyn, a former municipal administrator in the Luhansk region who also fled to Dnipro last spring as Russian forces advanced.
"We all live here at the shelter with the hope that [our homes] will be liberated and we will get a chance to go back," he said through an interpreter.
The shelter was set up with the help of a Czech charity network and with the participation of the city of Dnipro and municipal officials in Luhansk, who saw the need for shelters when the threat of war was growing more immediate, and during the early part of the invasion.
Ukraine's government has taken early steps to address the crisis of internally displaced people with programs under the Ministry of the Economy — either jobs programs or incentives for businesses to hire relocated people.
Yuliia Pavytska, an analyst at the Kyiv School of Economics, said there are studies underway looking at why many of the displaced can't find work. One of them launched just this week.
In some instances, it's pretty clear people are in limbo and clinging to the hope that they'll be going home soon.
"Maybe the problem is that these people are not looking for the job now because they're thinking of coming back in, like, one month or two," said Pavytska. "So for them, it's hard to find some short-term occupation."
In a commentary published online in early January, the U.S.-based, non-profit Brookings Institution called for a strategy to include those displaced — both inside and outside of the country — in Ukraine's reconstruction.
Absent such a strategy, people who are already abroad will stay there and those now out of their homes but still in the country will consider leaving permanently.
"For both the physical restoration of Ukrainian infrastructure as well as the reform of governance structures and processes, the human capital of the displaced millions will be essential for any national recovery to succeed," the report said.
Ukraine's ambassador to Canada recently presented President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a copy of the $500-million Ukraine Sovereignty Bond, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is backing. On Twitter, Yulia Kovaliv wrote that the bond will help Ukraine provide "needed social help to thousands of vulnerable people and [internally displaced people] in Ukraine. We are grateful for the robust support and count on our true friends and allies as we are fighting against [the] aggressor."
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CBC News The National has special coverage of the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chief Correspondent Adrienne Arsenault visited the front lines embedded with the Ukrainian military and hosts The National from within Ukraine all week. Watch The National at 10 p.m. (10:30 NT) on CBC-TV, 9 p.m. ET on CBC News Network and YouTube.
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