Mykola Ilnytsky, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate priest, rented a neglected, shabby kindergarten in the Kyiv Oblast city of Kotsiubynske in 2013 as a shelter for the needy.
Today, it still services that purposes, but for war refugees as well.
But here in Kotsiubynske, a small city of 13,000 people on the edge of Kyiv, nearly 200 internally displaced people from Crimea and the Donbas Oblast, including 80 children, have found sanctuary from war, havoc and death in the east of the country. They are from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds, and have differing religious and political views, but Russia’s war against Ukraine has united them in a common tragedy – all have left their homes, jobs and former lives behind them.
The shelter gives refugees a place to live, secondhand clothes and free food.
For Yulia Kostyuchenko, a mother of four children who lives in the center, such help is crucial. In June 2014 she and her family had to flee their home in Horlivka, a Donetsk Oblast city of 250,000 people some 50 kilometers north of Donetsk. Her four children started to stutter from trauma because of the constant shelling. Kostyuchenko, her husband, their children and her mother have never gone back home.
Now the family of seven lives in a tiny room. There is no furniture apart from several bunkbeds and a table. Nevertheless, they are happy, as times have been far worse.
“There were days when I had no money, no food to give my children. I was simply losing hope,” Kostyuchenko says of her life in the small town of Malyn in Zhytomyr Oblast, where the family moved first after leaving Horlivka.
Her husband’s modest salary was not enough to feed the family and pay the rent.
“So I had to shame myself and buy food on credit. Thankfully a saleswoman let me do that,” Kostyuchenko says, adding she had also had to gather wild berries and mushrooms to feed her family.
The Kostyuchenkos moved to the Kotsiubynske center in June 2015.
“I’m very grateful to this center, because it put us back on our feet,” Kostyuchenko says.
Although the shelter has provided her family with a quiet life for now, Kostyuchenko is still troubled. She is anxious about her future.
“I worry about accommodation. Property prices in Kyiv are so high that ordinary people could never afford to buy a flat there,” she says.
Yulia Kostyuchenko (L) speaks with the neighbor in her room in the shelter (Volodymyr Petrov).
For Viktoriya Olshevska, another resident of the Kotsiubynske center, the future is also uncertain. Before the war, Olshevska worked as a Ukrainian language teacher in Stakhanov, a city in Luhansk Oblast.
Her troubles started in November 2014 when the Russia-backed armed group that occupied her city demanded that she sign a paper to join the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, the Russian-backed separatist organization. She refused and was forced to quit her job.
Over the following nine months her only income was the Hr 300 per month that she received as state aid for single mothers. Then Olshevska barely escaped being taken captive after her former colleagues informed the separatists about her pro-Ukrainian views.
Last August Olshevska grabbed her seven-year son Herman and fled Stakhanov, spending her last savings on traveling to Kharkiv.
“The separatists promised people that all salaries and pensions would rise by three times. People believed them, but I never did,” Olshevska says.
She has been living in the shelter in Kotsiubynske since September 2015. She tried to find a job in a school in Kotsiubynske, but there were no job openings. She hopes to find a job as a school teacher this coming September, when the new school year starts. Until then, she plans to stay in the center.
The shelter’s rules require people living there to carry out cleaning and cooking duties in rotation. Every evening the residents attend a church service and pray for peace in Ukraine.
Back in March 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and the first domestic refugees started coming to the shelter, its founder, the priest Ilnytsky, had little to offer them.
The building was still under reconstruction. It had less than 10 rooms, none of which had central heating, Ilnytsky recalls. But aid soon arrived. The Canadian Embassy in Ukraine donated money to purchase some furniture and a central heating boiler, and the United Nations Office in Ukraine brought materials to renovate the building. The center now has more than 30 rooms, but it still needs more help, especially regular funding.
“We don’t have stable sources of funding. Usually, it’s private donations,” Ilnytsky says.
Mykola Yakubovych
sits in his room in the shelter together with his wife while telling his story
to the Kyiv Post (Volodymyr Petrov).
Belarusian Mykola Yakubovych, who currently lives with his family in the shelter, considers it a temporary place to stay and looks to the future with optimism. He is a big, active man who laughs a lot.
Recently he was granted Ukrainian citizenship.
“For me, Ukraine was always a synonym for freedom,” he says.
Yakubovych took an active part in the EuroMaidan Revolution protests that drove Viktor Yanukovych from power as president on Feb. 21, 2014.
Before Russia launched its war on Ukraine in the east, he lived in the small city of Kostyantynivka in Donetsk Oblast. Fighters from a Russian-backed armed group took him captive in May 2014 because of his pro-Ukrainian views and kept him prisoner in the basement of the Donetsk Regional State Administration building for five days.
Despite all he has gone through himself, Yakubovych has little sympathy for refugees who complain that the government or locals are not helping them.
“The revolution has only just begun, and we must carry it to its conclusion,” he says.
To make a donation to the Center for Rehabilitation and Social Aid go to www.domm.at.ua.
