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As the Russian army continues to make plodding advances in eastern Ukraine, fresh waves of refugees threaten to overwhelm the humanitarian organizations that have been housing internally displaced Donbas natives since the early months of the war.
Living conditions initially designed to be temporary stop-gap solutions are turning into a permanent reality for many former inhabitants of cities such as Kharkiv, Severodonetsk, Lysychansk and Sloviansk.
Newsweek spoke with elderly aid recipients who have been resettled into temporary housing in Lviv. One was Hanna Ivanovna, who left her apartment in Kharkiv after Russian airplanes bombed her neighborhood in late February.
"All we could do was crawl towards the wall and lay down. It was not possible to get to the basement from the fourth floor," she said. "Every time a bomb fell, it was like the whole building jumped."
Ivanovna and her family endured the bombardment for over two weeks, but an hour after her son finally decided that it was time to flee, she found herself at the train station carrying nothing but the clothes on her back. Ivanovna's grandson suffers from epilepsy, and although there were no tickets available, his disability gave the family priority to board the next available train, which happened to be headed to Lviv.
After arriving in the west of the country, volunteers directed the family to a help center, which placed them in a kindergarten that had been converted to temporary housing. Although Ivanovna's son has since returned to Kharkiv, she has remained in the kindergarten along with her epileptic grandson and daughter-in-law.
"We want the war to end, and we want to go home," she said. "Kharkiv was such a blossoming, thriving city. It has been wounded, but we still want to go home. That's our only dream."
In less than five months of fighting, more than 13 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes. While many of those have found refuge abroad, and some from cities such as Kyiv have since opted to return to their apartments, the International Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that 6.4 million Ukrainians remain internally displaced.
One of the groups actively working to alleviate the crisis is HelpAge International. For the nearly eight years leading up to the Russian invasion on February 24, HelpAge worked to ensure that elderly Ukrainians living on the front lines of the Donbas conflict received food aid and psycho-social support.
That earlier conflict, which pitted the Russian-controlled forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics against units from the Ukrainian military, killed more than 14,000 soldiers and civilians between April 2014 and February 2022.
The overwhelming majority of those casualties came in the opening months of that earlier war. It was only after Russian forces launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine this past winter that the current wave of internally displaced Ukrainians was forced from their homes in the country's east.
Viktoria Panchenko, Program Lead at the newly opened Lviv office of HelpAge International, was herself displaced by the recent full scale Russian escalation. Up until February 24, she had been working for the organization from its outpost in her home city of Sloviansk.
"Even before the current escalation, our focus was on helping the elderly," Panchenko told Newsweek. "We assisted by delivering food and medicines to those who lacked mobility, and we promoted active lifestyles and provided psycho-social support for the 60+ community in general."
She did her work very close to the front lines.
"Our main activities all took place within five kilometers of the line of contact, exclusively on the side controlled by the government in Kyiv," Panchencko said. "Of course, we saw that there was also a great demand for such services on the other side of the line, but those territories were inaccessible to us."
When Russian bombs started falling on Sloviansk nearly five months ago, Panchenko, like several of the displaced elderly she still serves, managed to escape to the west on an overcrowded train.
"In a compartment designed for four people, there were sixteen of us — seven adults and seven children, plus a dog and a cat," she said.
The exodus of residents has limited the sort of work that HelpAge can do in its former area of operations.
"Now Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are almost completely under Russian control, and so all of our offices in such territories are closed," Panchenko said. "There are still volunteers helping individual elderly who remain in the area, even though there is daily and nightly shelling."
For those who have managed to escape the warzone, meeting basic needs still remains a challenge. Although HelpAge has partnered with other humanitarian organizations to provide over 35,000 internally displaced elderly Ukrainians with food aid, hygiene kits, cash assistance, and temporary housing, it has thus far proven impossible to restore those affected by the war to anything approaching their previous standard of living.
Lyubov Usenko left the Donbas frontline city of Lysychansk in April.
"It was insufferable," she told Newsweek. "I did not want to go, but when they started to hit Severodonetsk across the river, it was as if there were a fireworks display inside of our apartment. I told my kids we had to go. It didn't matter where. We just had to go."
After a bus ride to the city of Dnipro, Usenko's granddaughter convinced the family to continue on to Lviv.
"It's because she is a patriot," Usenko said.
In Lviv, Usenko, her daughter, and her granddaughter were placed in a housing pod provided by Polish Aid. The neighborhood, consisting of around two dozen one-room units, is located on the outdoor basketball court of a university campus.
"When the air raid sirens go off, we just put a pillow over our head and hide under the covers so as not to hear it," she said. "We were close enough to so many explosions that we don't get worried about an air raid siren."
Despite signage in the area indicating that the IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) were receiving help from the World Food Kitchen, Usenko had several complaints.
"They feed us only lunch," she said. "Today it was pea soup and cutlets with something-or-other. I'm diabetic. I need fish, not meat."
"My back hurts, my knees hurt," she added. "I have serious headaches."
"At home, we had everything," Usenko said. "If we could have stayed in Lysychansk, we would have. Now we don't know when we'll be able to go home. Everything is destroyed."
Another elderly IDP, Nina Svistunov, remained significantly more upbeat than Ivanova or Usenko, despite the fact that her living conditions appeared to be significantly less comfortable than those of others in the same situation.
"I like Lviv. It's clean, it's light, and the people are friendly," she said while seated on her assigned army cot in the crowded university gymnasium that has become her home. "Whatever we need, the volunteers provide it for us."
Svistunov arrived in Lviv in early April after fleeing from Severodonetsk.
"For a month and a half I lived in the basement," she said. "It was very cold. The house shook [under the bombardment]. I decided to leave."
After taking a taxi to the local bus station, she was evacuated to Sloviansk. From there, a train brought her to Lviv.
"At first we slept on a mattress on the floor, but now we have cots," Svistunov said. "It's fine. The only thing I lack is my health."
"I really want to go home," she added. "But it's been destroyed with bombs, and marauders are roaming the streets."
Svistunov had a message for those around the world who are following the conflict.
"I think the whole world sees how we are fighting, and it understands how we suffer," she said. "I think they will help us. We will be victorious."
Despite the heartfelt hopes of Ukraine's displaced elderly, the artillery war in the Donbas shows no sign of abating anytime soon. As the war drags on, it becomes increasingly likely that, for many of them, a return to what is left of their homes in the east will not become a viable option in what is left of their lifetimes.
How long families can cope with life in a converted kindergarten, a temporary housing pod or on a gymnasium floor cot remains unclear.
"We are hoping that the conflict will end in the coming months," said Panchenko, the HelpAge Program Lead who herself was displaced from Sloviansk. "But if it doesn't end, then we will have to do something to reorganize our program in order to move forward."
For her, there is no end in sight.
"Working for twelve hours every day can be a helpful way to distract oneself from the reality of the war, at least temporarily," Panchenko said. "But the work is endless; it's hard. We are doing as much as we can to help, but the situation remains hard."
