Donate to purchase a book

There has been a war and people have seen so many houses reduced to rubble that they no longer feel safe in their own homes which once seemed so quiet and secure. This is something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by. True, we have a lamp on the table again, and a little vase of flowers, and pictures of our loved ones, but we can no longer trust any of these things because once, suddenly, we had to leave them behind, or because we have searched through the rubble for them in vain.

Natalia Ginzburg, The Son of Man

During our volunteer trips across Ukraine – aimed at repairing housing for internally displaced people (IDPs) or supporting frontline communities – we talk with people about an always-happy past; one defined by stability, where one had a solid foundation underfoot, in contrast to the chaos of destruction, displacement, and homelessness that defines the everyday existence of millions of Ukrainians today. Talking amongst ourselves on the drive home, or between villages, we try to examine the truth to the idea of this stability. The mass privatisation of property in the early 1990s had provided the vast majority of Ukrainian citizens with a reliable roof over their head, officially their own. But, even before going into the capitalist chaos of the unregulated rental market that followed, we began to think about the events that came before this. In a little over a century, Ukraine has experienced the Soviet expropriation of all private property; the building of so-called “social cities”, intended to provide dignified housing to workers; the destruction and displacement wrought by the Second World War; mass forced displacement (including of the entire Crimean Tatar nation); the construction of cheap housing en-masse in the 1950s-70s; independence and that aforementioned mass privatisation and birth of a rental market – and now war and occupation once again.

In these twists and turns of life and history, many people have spent years unable to make sense of it all, piecing together fragments of their family’s housing story from the past: the grandmother deported to Siberia; the house seized and resettled by workers from Russia; the apartment handed over by a factory, and then privatised in the 1990s. At the same time, you must think about the present – which at minimum means checking the state register and confirming that your apartment, privatised by someone at some point, actually appears there: because in the event of wartime destruction, that record may be the only way you can claim state compensation if a missile hits.

Subscribe now

The idea for this collection was born on one of our volunteering trips; it seemed to us that the historical and contemporary experiences of housing in Ukraine are central not only to individual lives, but to the formation of the country’s national identity. The war has ruptured much of what people thought they knew about housing, destroying the stability they gained following privatisation that it once seemed that they could believe in long-term. War is, on the one hand, a unifying event, bringing together the country against a common aggressor. Yet, it also polarises, the extremity of individual experiences pulling people further and further apart from one another.

In a single village, a few miles from the frontline, will live a family, evacuated from occupation but afraid to go further from the only place they’ve called home. Next door to them might live a grandmother, who refuses to move further because she built this house herself, along with her husband who is buried nearby. One house further along lives a group of soldiers, when they are not on shift, and not living in a trench two villages further east. The owners of that house, and that in which the displaced family are living, could be anywhere. Maybe they are in Hannover or Krakow or Birmingham, or possibly in Chernivtsi or Lviv or Uzhhorod, to the west of Ukraine. Most likely though, they are also not very far away, perhaps in Dnipro or Pavlohrad or Kharkiv, the closest rear cities to the front. They rent their home to refugees or soldiers, to pay their rent there in turn, and the cycle goes on, the prices rising, as each person moves a step to the west, and the most vulnerable – the soldiers, and the families closest to the front, bearing the brunt.

***

For some, the urge to stay in your home, right up until the moment it is destroyed, is powerful. Even beyond their home’s partial or complete destruction, many people may choose to remain, living amongst ruins, getting used to the constant sounds of drones and artillery, continuing to plant their gardens and refusing to allow themselves to be displaced. Some have never left their homes, whilst others have gone and returned, driven by homesickness, financial instability, or familial responsibilities. People live in a constant state of suspension, every day postponing the displacement which may well become inevitable.

Donate to purchase a book

For those who face displacement, so begins the journey of starting again. This new wave of mass internal migration, which began in early 2025 with the intensification of the Russian advance on western Donetsk Oblast (a highly urbanised area, home to cities such as Dobropillia, Myrnohrad and Pokrovsk) has forced many of those who once swore to stay in their homes until the end to think again, persuaded by terrified relatives, convincing volunteers, or by their own survival instinct.

The latter months of 2025 going into 2026 saw this intensification increase, with the occupation of Myrnohrad and Pokrovsk, and the movement of fighting to the vicinity of Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, and Druzhkivka. Through our work with people from these areas, we understand that relatively few of them leave Ukraine, instead moving to as close a point of “safety” as they can find. For some, this involves moving just a few kilometres away to neighbouring villages or areas, in the knowledge that a further evacuation may be necessary in as little as a few months’ time. Motivations for this vary: some want to ensure that they are able to keep checking on their apartments, others to keep looking after their gardens, others so that they are able to continue work in critical areas such as mining or the police force. Others are simply afraid to travel further away from home.

***

In October 2022, KHARPP launched its KHARPP Remont [Repairs] programme in de-occupied and formerly frontline areas of Kharkiv Oblast. Working predominantly in villages close to the border with Russia, which were either under occupation, or on the frontline, up until September 2022, but had not seen any fighting since, our priority was the repair of private homes and public buildings. Between the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2024, we completed basic repairs (windows, doors, roofing) to over 900 homes in 18 villages. You’ll find an interview with Tetiana, a resident of Tsupivka, one village where we worked in Kharkiv Oblast, where she details the reasons to stay behind, despite the danger.

Subscribe now

Our understanding of repairs has always extended beyond simply physical home repairs. For many de-occupied villages, poverty is as much of a threat to people’s lives as the cold in damaged homes, or as a potential shelling. This is why we always employed local teams to complete all our repairs in each village, paying a fair wage, and ensuring that money went back into the local economy. We also sourced all materials as locally as possible, generally from Kharkiv itself.

Following the worsening military situation in Kharkiv Oblast in summer 2024, we began to slow down our work in the region, and by spring 2025, we were forced to place this part of our project on an indefinite hiatus. Since then, we have shifted our focus to the improvement of IDP housing, in particular for those from the west of Donetsk Oblast and the east of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, who have been displaced since the intensification of the Russian advance in the region. We noted a trend amongst IDPs throughout 2025, where families – in particular those with multiple children, members with limited mobility, or livestock – were pooling together all of their savings to buy cottages in central Ukraine, generally costing between $3,000-10,000. These cottages, whilst providing a sense of stability, generally lack the basic conditions required for living: water, gas, flooring, kitchens, bathrooms, etc. In some cases, they are little more than shacks, able only to provide the most basic form of shelter. Our work thus shifted to the improvement of these cottages, to ensure that the people who move there are able to begin this new phase of their lives with dignity. Oksana Morhun, one of the recipients of this new programme, is interviewed about her experiences of leaving her home behind and starting again.

In Autumn 2025, we collaborated with the Dnipro-based Construction Festival to raise money to purchase a property for a displaced family of nine people from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, beginning our new programme of home purchasing for refugee families. The logic behind our decision to focus on home purchase is based on our understanding that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mass privatisation of property in Ukraine led to a situation in which a social housing system has not emerged, as it has in other European countries (see Oleksandr Anisimov’s article in this publication). Similarly, strong renters’ rights have also not taken hold in Ukraine, leading to a huge scale of abuse of renters by landlords (see Galyna Sukhomud’s interview with the founders of the Tenants Union of Ukraine). For many who stay behind in occupied or frontline areas, it is the insecurity of the rental system in safer parts of the country which pushes them to do so.

By purchasing and handing over property to refugee families who are unable to access government compensation, we hope to provide them with at least some stability, in the knowledge that now, as home owners, they will now be eligible for repair and housing certificates (see Jamie Onslow and Ada Wordsworth’s analysis of the current state of the this compensation programme) should their new home be damaged in the future (as is possible in any part of Ukraine, no matter how far from the front), and that they will not be thrown out by a landlord intent on increasing rents as high as they can go in response to the huge demand.

The texts in this publication cover a wide range of topics and opinions, going far beyond the specific work of KHARPP, but all connecting to the overarching theme of housing and the home. Oleksii Minko and Michał Murawksi both look at different aspects of housing under occupation, whilst Anna-Mariia Kucherenko and Viktoriia Grivina provide us with microhistories of their home cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv through the prism of housing. Experiences of different forms of displacement are similarly explored by Mykhaylo Bogachov, Bogdana Ferguson, Emine Ziyatdin, and an anonymous Crimean Tatar writer. Andrii Ushytskyi explores the emotional complexities of the new borders created by war. We are especially pleased to be able to include an interview with Ihor, a Ukrainian serviceman, about his experience of housing on the frontline, and the ways that this has changed since 2022.

As the war and occupation continue, more people are displaced every day and more people are displaced every day, whilst at the same time, more soldiers move to frontline areas, the question of housing in Ukraine is made ever more vital.

Ada Wordsworth and Katia Khimei, June 2026

Donate to purchase a book

(please remember to email contact@kharpp.com with your shipping details)

Donate

Viktoriia has been displaced twice - first from her hometown of Donetsk in 2014, where she fled the Russian occupation with her grandmother. Later, in 2022, she, her grandmother, and her young son, Andrii (who was born in displacement in Selydove, a small town outside Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast, and has autism as well as various health conditions), were forced to leave once again. After living for three years in a single room in a shelter, where all three contracted Covid (the long-term effects of which Andrii is still dealing with), they last year moved to two small rooms in Dnipro, without a kitchen and with a shared bathroom. The rent for this accommodation was more than their monthly refugee payments from the government, meaning that Viktoriia (who, as a full-time carer for her son and grandmother, cannot work), was forced to sell possessions each month to afford it. The apartment which we have found them is walking distance from Andrii’s school, with a playground in the backyard. Most importantly, though, it’s theirs, providing them with the foundation they need to start again. Over the past month, we have been collecting furniture from throughout Ukraine for them and funding basic repairs on the apartment. All being well, they will move in at the end of this week. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without your help; thank you all.

Mariia and her three sons, two of whom also have autism and require full-time care, left Lysychansk, in Luhansk Oblast, in 2022. Since then they have also been renting, staying in a small town to the east of Pavlohrad, an area which remains under threat. Unfortunately, although we have finalised the purchase of their new home, Mariia is currently undergoing cancer treatment, which means that their move will not be possible until later in the summer. For now, we are waiting for her signal that she is strong enough to relocate, at which point we will help with all the costs of moving and setting up in their new house.

Donate

Alongside this purchasing programme, we are also continuing our work supporting refugees with home repairs, as well as supporting the villages in Kharkiv Oblast where we are no longer able to work on reconstruction. This month, with the generous support of Saint Mary and All Saints’ Church in Charlbury in Oxfordshire, we purchased several drone detectors for Slatyne, which will help the administration to warn residents ahead of time if there are Russian drones approaching the village, as, unfortunately, its proximity to the border means that conventional air alerts are no longer effective against the drone threat.

All of this is only possible with your support, and we are so grateful that we are able to keep doing this work. Over the past few weeks, we have also been made aware of two further housing-related situations where urgent support is required, and we would like to appeal to you to assist us in this.

Subscribe now

Granny Olia lived her whole life on the outskirts of Kostiantynivka keeping a large smallholding, mostly goats and chickens. From speaking with her she has a clearly pro-Ukrainian position and deep knowledge of history, in particular the history of the Donbas, where she was born. As the front approached she categorically refused evacuation because of her large number of animals. Since her husband’s death many years ago she has lived alone; in a village nearby lived her son, who sadly did not support her in any way due to problems with alcohol. A year and a half ago, when Kostiantynivka was already coming under heavy shelling, she met Taras Ibrahimov, a correspondent with Suspilne (the Ukrainian public broadcaster), and the Polish journalist Paweł Reszka. Baba Olia’s house ended up right next to the defence line that had been set up near the town to prevent the advance of Russian troops. Every day Olia drove her livestock out to pasture past the dragon’s teeth fortifications. This visual image caught their attention, as a vivid illustration of what local residents face when the front approaches their homes.

Donate

Several times Taras and his colleagues brought her food and basic necessities, while it was still possible to travel into the town. Later, as fighting intensified, they lost contact with her. However, a few months ago she managed to make contact with Taras again and told him that by some miracle she had managed to evacuate, covering 15 kilometres on foot, taking only her documents, dogs, and cats with her. He also learned from Olia that her house has been completely destroyed, and most of her livestock killed. At present she is temporarily living in one of the most heavily shelled districts of Kyiv in a single dormitory room measuring 15 square metres along with her grandson and his girlfriend. Due to the lack of space, they sleep in shifts. Olia continues to fear loud noises, and dreams of a small village house in any region far from the front so she can quietly live out her old age. We are hoping to raise money to buy Olia a small house and plot of land in a safer area of Ukraine. This will cost around £8,000, and we will be so grateful for any support you can offer to help us to reach this goal.

We were also recently contacted regarding Oleksandr and Olha Ptytsia, a couple from Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast, now living in central Ukraine with their three adopted sons, all of whom have various health conditions which require constant care. Having fled in 2022, leaving behind two houses, an apartment, and stable work, they sought somewhere with access to medical and educational infrastructure nearby. Eventually, they found Horodkivka, a village in Vinnytsia Oblast, where the head of the community, Olena Reznyk, first housed them next door to herself. Only in 2025 were they finally able to buy a house of their own, however it is unfinished and not yet fit to live in.

For now, all five of them live in the small summer kitchen in the yard, sharing one bedroom, with the toilet and shower outside. “Right now it’s fine, because it’s warm,” Olha says. “But when the cold comes, there simply won’t be enough space. We don’t even have room for a wardrobe.”

Oleksandr is a pensioner; Olha works at a sewing factory. Because Avdiivka is occupied, they cannot receive compensation for the homes they lost, and the community budget cannot cover the building work. Oleksandr and Olha still hope to adopt more children, and the finished house would have room for them. The work required to make the house liveable in is extensive, including full replacing the roof and many of the windows, and putting in insulation. Please consider supporting us as we begin this new project.

Donate

Alongside this, we are so excited to announce that we have produced a small, bilingual book, entitled “Housing and the Home in Ukraine”. It’s a collection of sixteen texts which explore issues surrounding housing, both in connection to the war and prior to it, from personal, academic, and journalistic perspectives. The topics covered range from displacement to the decision to remain in your home close to the frontline, along with other pieces on housing under Russian occupation, the experience of soldiers related to housing, and that of Crimean Tatars. We held a launch in Uzhhorod, in the west of Ukraine, last week, and tonight will host another in Kyiv, with readings and discussions of issues around housing and displacement. We are selling it in the UK for £20, plus £5 postage, with all proceeds going, of course, to KHARPP, and to our work supporting refugees with relocation. If you are interested in purchasing a copy, please donate by usual methods here, and email us at donate@kharpp.com with your name and address. Please allow a couple of weeks for postage from Kyiv! In the autumn, we also hope to come to the UK for a series of fundraising events around the book. We have tentative plans so far in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews, but if you might have further ideas and suggestions please let us know.

Once again, thank you all for remaining with us. It is almost four-and-a-half years since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and even as more and more people are displaced or have their homes destroyed every day, attention continues to slip away. So, the fact that we are able to continue to support these communities, and that they know that they can rely on us, is such a privilege, and we are so grateful to everyone who keeps donating and sharing our work.

Donate

Subscribe now

However, when Spring finally came in March and April we renewed our work, focussing predominantly on our home purchasing project begun in late last year, when we bought a house for a family of nine from eastern Ukraine. We have been liaising over the last months with a shelter for internally displaced people based in Dnipro, and together we have identified two families with whom we will work for the next phase of the project. We are now actively searching for new homes in safer regions of Ukraine, with the aim of finalising the purchases in the next few weeks.

One of these families consists of Viktoriia, her son Andrii, and her grandmother Vira. Originally from Donetsk, Viktoriia and Vira originally fled the city in 2014, when it was first occupied by Russian forces, moving to Selydove, a smaller town still in the Donbas, but to the west, which remained under Ukrainian control. There, Viktoriia met her husband and had Andrii. When the war started, fighting quickly spread to Selydove, and they fled to Dnipro, where they spent the next three years living in a single room in a shelter. During this time, they all contracted Covid, with Andrii becoming especially sick; he is still dealing with the consequences today. He was also diagnosed with autism. Last year, Viktoriia decided that the situation was untenable, and decided to try to find rented accommodation. They now live in a small, two-room apartment nearby to the shelter, with a shared kitchen. The rent each month comes to more than their combined benefits as internally displaced people, and Viktoriia is therefore regularly forced to either sell possessions or to take out a loan, since she is unable to work as the full-time carer of both Andrii and her grandmother. With the rest of the family living under occupation, and Andrii’s father no longer present, there is no source of external support. Meeting Viktoriia and hearing her story, we immediately knew that we needed to help her in any way we could. Their requirements for housing are complex, driven in part by Andrii’s need to be close to a specialist school and hospital as a result of his autism and the impacts of long Covid, as well as other factors, and we have spent six weeks so far searching for accommodation. As Viktoriia regularly tells us, the most important thing for her is that they will have a place that they can call their own.

Donate

We are also helping Mariia and her three sons to find a home. Originally from Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast, the family moved immediately at the start of the war. Over the past four years, they have been forced to move six more times as a result of landlords hiking rents. Two of Mariia’s sons are also autistic, and Mariia herself is currently receiving treatment for cervical cancer. This has once again meant that the search itself has been tricky, and more protracted than we had anticipated, given her need to be close to a hospital which can provide the treatment that she needs. We hope very much that in the next few weeks something will come through.

At the same time, we are continuing our repairs project for internally displaced people across the country, with a focus on providing basic repairs to make homes liveable, with a stress on access to water and gas. Nobody in Ukraine has any misconceptions about the fact that the upcoming winter will likely be as hard, if not harder, than the previous one, and so our focus this summer will be on winterization of as many homes as possible.

Donate

Thank you all for sticking with us – even through our protracted silence. We are here to stay, come what may, and will continue, for as long as you support us, to adapt to whatever the next months and years bring, always remaining flexible and efficient as we do so. I hope very much that in the next few weeks we will be back with another update on Viktoriia and Mariia, and their house hunts!

Donate

This autumn, we formalised the purchase of a house for a family from Novopavlivka, a village in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast which now exists in the so-called “grey-zone”, with heavy fighting ongoing. Viktoria and Yura evacuated in the early months of this year, along with their five children and Viktoria’s parents. They spent much of the year renting a small apartment in the south of the country, unable to work and with no idea how they would move forward to once again find the stability which they had had at home in Novopavlivka. The house which we have bought is big enough for the whole family, in a village where they have friends and there are job opportunities. Four of the children’s five children have already started school there, whilst Yura has started work. More than anything, we hope that it will give them the foundation they need to move forward and begin to rebuild their lives. The house cost around £8,000, and we anticipate spending another £5-6,000 on repairs over the next two months, including ensuring they have consistent water access. We couldn’t do this without your donations, and we are so grateful, in particular to the Telegraph’s Ukraine: the Latest podcast, and David Knowles’ family, who chose to promote a fundraiser for our work in order to honour David, the podcast’s founder and host, and to mark a year since his death. We are also particularly grateful to Construction Festival, who also fundraised for the house’s purchase this summer. There is something very moving about the combination of both local and international efforts which went into this purchase. At a time when global support for Ukraine can often feel shaky, it is so important to remember and take strength from how many people globally continue to show their support.

Donate

Our work on repairs for internally displaced people is also ongoing. As the frontline situation in Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts continues to worsen, we continue to work with families who have fled the worst of the fighting to ensure that their new accommodation is fit for habitation, funding everything from the repairs of roofs and wells, to bathrooms and kitchens. We hope very much to collect enough money over this Christmas period to be able to buy another property outright for a family, this time from the city of Myrnohrad, which is almost completely surrounded by Russian troops. We need to raise a further £10,000 to be able to realistically commit to this, and so please consider donating to help us achieve this goal and provide another family with a place to call home in a safer part of the country.

Alongside this work, we continue to support the villages in Kharkiv Oblast in any way we can. Whilst the military situation means that our work on home repairs there remains paused, with the support of the village of Charlbury in Oxfordshire we have been able to support the administration in Slatyne with new winter tires for the car which we bought for them earlier this year, as well as repairing two wells for public use in the village. We will also this week purchase portable power stations and generators in order to help the village to get through the winter in amongst the power shortages, along with a wood-chipper to ensure there is fuel for heating.

Donate

It can feel difficult at the moment to cut through the constant noise surrounding peace talks. Nobody can say for sure what the new year will bring, but we remain committed to our work here. The war drags on, and continues to intensify, and regardless of what is happening in negotiation rooms thousands of miles away, this winter will be long and hard. Our flexibility remains our greatest strength as an organisation, as we continue to respond to the changing situation on the ground, for example this week purchasing an inflatable boat for the Kharkiv fire and rescue services, after theirs were destroyed in a Russian airstrike. We still long for the opportunity to once again be able to focus all our energies on repairs in Kharkiv Oblast, but for now are committed to working in whatever way we can to make life easier both for those Ukrainians who have stayed in their homes, and those who have been forced to leave them behind. Our work is only possible thanks to your support, and it is a constant beacon of light to know that, even after all these years, so many people still continue to keep up with our work and to donate. Thank you all, and Merry Christmas.

Donate

In amongst this stress, we have continued our work as best we can. Whilst the situation in the villages we have grown so attached to in Kharkiv Oblast has remained too dangerous for us to work there, we have worked to expand our programme supporting internally displaced people (IDPs) with home repairs. Some of the families we have been working with this summer have included Oksana and her young son Dima, from Novopavlivka, who used all their savings to buy a small, half-finished cottage in Cherkasy Oblast for $1,000 – a cottage complete with a roof and walls, but lacking a floor; Tamara and her husband and parents, also from Novopavlivka, who evacuated to a cottage in the west of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which they bought for a few thousand dollars, and which, whilst generally liveable in, is entirely unsuitable for the needs of her elderly parents, who are mostly bedbound, and for whom we have bought new mattresses as well as refurbishing what was a crumbling and inaccessible bathroom. For Nastya, a young mother from Avdiivka (a city flattened and occupied last year by Russian forces), now also living in the west of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, we have repaired her entire heating system, to ensure that she, her toddler son, her teenage brother, and the baby she has on the way, will be able to live out the winter, whilst her husband continues to serve on the front. For several other families, we have funded the digging of wells in their garden, and the repair of mains water supplies, as many cottages in rural areas of central Ukraine are still without running water. The work we are doing is simple and practical, ensuring that those who leave seeking safety are able to survive in comfort and warmth. The workload is enormous, not least due to the geographical scale given that these families are spread throughout the whole of Ukraine. Nonetheless, we are slowly but surely making our way through the approximately 500 requests for support from households in similar situations which we have received – but this is only possible with your help.

Donate

The intensification of fighting in Donetsk Oblast, and Russian advances in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, have meant that this new wave of IDPs is growing every day, and with it a new housing crisis is emerging in Ukraine. Where at the start of summer, the problem was finding somewhere affordable to rent or buy, the problem now is finding anything at all, with prices sky-rocketing. Over the summer, we partnered with the Dnipro Centre for Contemporary Culture and ran a fundraiser for €10,000, with which we plan to buy a cottage for an IDP family, which, with your help, we hope to renovate. We are already on the lookout for the perfect cottage, as well as working closely with the Novopavlivka village administration to identify the most appropriate family. We hope very much that this will be the beginning of a larger programme of assistance with resettlement for families from frontline territories.

Alongside this work, our other expenses this summer have included the repair of windows for an IDP family from occupied territories, now living in Kyiv, whose apartment was severely damaged during one of the numerous attacks over the past few months, as well as continuing to provide energy support for communities across the east of the country.

As this strange and painful summer comes to a close, we want to thank you all once again for remaining with us, and with Ukraine. It can feel like a struggle at times to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we continue to work with the understanding that we do not have the right to despair, only to support as best we can. Together, with your invaluable help, we continue to make a real, practical difference to people’s daily existence in the harshest of circumstances. We also want to extend our gratitude to the Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast, as well as the Knowles family, for their promotion of our work as part of a fundraiser in memory of David, the founder and host of the podcast who passed away last year.

Donate

We are so pleased to be able to support these families as they adjust to lives as internally displaced people. However, our list of requests grows larger every day - and is currently at around 200 - so please consider continuing to donate, in order to ensure that we are able to help families like those mentioned in this newsletter.

Donate

On this trip, we also visited the grave of the recently killed Ukrainian artist and soldier Marharyta Polovinko. I never met Marharyta personally, but her artwork had illustrated the essay series we took part in late last year for e-flux, and she was supposed to also be taking part in the public programme of the Venice Architecture Biennale’s Ukrainian Pavilion alongside KHARPP. She was also a close personal friend of numerous people who work with KHARPP. Her death is a further reminder of the countless sacrifices being made every day in Ukraine and as an organisation we sent all of our solidarity, love, and condolences to her friends and family.

We set off from Kyiv on the Monday morning after Easter. In the car were me, Ada, Katia and Ivanka.

Our trip would take us south from Kyiv into the oblasts of central Ukraine. We were visiting the new homes of Katia’s family friends from Myrnohrad, a town that is now on the frontline in Donetsk Oblast, with the intention of helping with repairs to make the homes fit for longterm inhabitation.

Myrnohrad’s neighbour, Pokrovsk, is one of those Ukrainian towns that has gone from relative obscurity to international fame as a hotspot in the war – a change in status that also marks the end of a town’s life. Just like Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad is currently in the process of being flattened by Russian bombs. Of a prewar population of 50,000, only a few thousand remain.

Katia organised the evacuation of several families from the town in August last year. We would be staying first with Tetia (Auntie) Maryna and Diadia (Uncle) Serhii, Katia’s childhood neighbours. And then Tetia Daria and Diadia Ihor, Katia’s sister’s godmother, and her husband.

As we drove out of the city, Ada took a call from Kolia, the starosta of Novopavlivka, a village near the front in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, whose residents KHARPP is beginning to support in moving to safer parts of the country.

She asked him how things were. His answer somewhat punctured our buoyant mood. Kolia’s house had been destroyed by a Russian bomb on Easter Saturday, his farm just the night before.

This is my first time leaving Kyiv since I arrived two months ago. At times in Kyiv you can come close to forgetting there’s a war on. People go to bars and clubs and hang around at coffee shops. But there’s a sense of unease – everyone is fully aware that people are being killed and towns razed to the ground just a few hours away. People keep on telling me that Kyiv is not “real Ukraine.”

Our route initially takes us along the left bank of the Dnipro river. As we cross from Kyiv oblast into Cherkasy Oblast, Katia announces that “this is real Ukraine.”

The roads are in a bad state, littered with potholes, but either side of the road the sun beams down on trees just coming into leaf. Enormous fields stretch over the gently rolling countryside. Tractors throw up long dust clouds. We’re all reduced to offering inane commentary on the rural idyll unfolding before us. Ukraine is so beautiful. Ukraine is so nice. I love Ukraine. And so on.

Driving in war-time Ukraine brings its own challenges. At one point the GPS cuts out without me realising, and I confidently drive off the road and onto a farm track. Katia tries to suggest that I’ve taken a wrong turn, but I calmly point to Google Maps, which shows that I’m following the correct route.

A few minutes later the GPS switches back on again and it becomes clear that I’ve driven well off the route. We decide to stop in the middle of a field to stretch our legs. I turn the car around, and as we leave a fighter jet appears overhead. Then we spot a plume of smoke on the horizon. We piece together what’s happened – there’s been a Russian missile attack, during which GPS services are unavailable. Taking wrong turns is far less embarrassing when you can blame it on the Russians.

Our first stop is in the village of Stetsivka. A friend of Kolia’s the starosta of Novopavlivka, owns a derelict khata (cottage) in the village which he has offered to a family of internally displaced people. Ada wants to have a look at it to see if it could be made inhabitable.

It takes us some time to find the khata, driving down an increasingly uneven dirt track. It’s engulfed by vegetation. The exterior walls are tiled white, the roof and window shutters painted green. It’s not hard to imagine it being a quaint countryside retreat. Ada jokes that she might move in herself.

It’s in decent condition - windows all in their frames, roof intact. There’s a well in the garden that could provide water if fitted with a pump. But there’s no indoor kitchen or bathroom, and no central heating. It will take some work to make it liveable.

Donate

Ada wonders aloud whether IDPs from Novopavlivka would be willing to move into such basic accommodation. Katia points out that many of them are already living in far worse conditions.

We get to Kosivka after nightfall, where we ‘re staying with Tetia Maryna and Diadia Serhiy, old friends and former neighbours of Katia’s family. It was the first time that Katia had seen them in five years - after the war started she thought she would probably never see them again.

Maryna sits Katia down and starts fussing over her, her broad smile infecting all of us as we gather around the kitchen table to eat. Maryna has prepared vast amounts of food, and I seem to be singled out as a particular focus for nourishment. “You’re a man, you must eat,” she explains.

Maryna and Serhiy had moved from an apartment in Myrnohrad to a private cottage some ten years ago. They had spent years turning it into a home for their retirement with all the most modern European conveniences and a blooming rose garden. Katia had visited many times and spoke about it as a pinnacle of domestic comfort. They decided to leave when a Russian shell exploded in their garden.

They are the only IDPs who’ve settled in Kosivka. They have not found the village to be particularly welcoming, and their fellow residents have kept themselves at a distance.

“There’s no war here, and they don’t what it’s like. We’re almost like foreigners to them,” Maryna said, recounting how a neighbour had refused to sell her some of her smetana.

Donate

We tell them about the khata we’d visited earlier that day, which prompts a word of warning from Maryna. She and Serhiy had twice moved into rented cottages after leaving Myrnohrad, spending their own money on renovations, only for the owners to evict them in order to sell the property once they had made it liveable.

They eventually found a cottage to buy in Kosivka for a few thousand dollars. For a third time they spent their savings on renovations – heating, light and running water. Katya told us that Maryna loves to cook, and we were treated to an unbelievable selection of dishes. But she was embarrassed to show us her kitchen, which is in an outhouse across a yard.

Katia helps cook breakfast the next day, and comes back shocked. She said she could never have imagined Tetia Maryna cooking in such a kitchen – the walls smeared black and green with mould.

KHARPP is going to do work to improve Maryna’s kitchen. She and Serhiy have a granddaughter, who they look after for at least a few nights every week. She’s twelve years old, and was so traumatised by the war and her evacuation from Myrnohrad that she developed diabetes. Having a sanitary and comfortable cooking space will make it easier for Maryna to give her the care that she requires.

The next day we drive further south to Kryvyi Rih, birthplace of Volodymyr Zelenskyi. I’ve never seen a city like it. It’s supposedly the longest city in Europe, and tracks a vein of iron ore that runs north to south. We drove in through vast Mordor-like hillsides carved up by lorries shuttling back and forth. Vast industrial citadels dot the landscape, surrounded by clusters of ramshackle cottages.

We visit the military graveyard in Kryviy Rih, where a close friend of Katya and Ivankas’ had been buried ten days earlier. Marharyta Polovinko had been a rising star of the Ukrainian art world. She joined the army last year, and was killed by a Russian drone on 4 April.

I didn’t really know what to expect from the graveyard. As we walk in Ada asks me if I’d visited a military graveyard before, and I say no – half expecting it to be a bit like my first sights of other military-related artefacts in Ukraine, or like going round historic sites of death where you know something terrible happened but it’s impossible to really comprehend it.

But as we walk across the gravel towards the graves, I see an old man getting back into his car, wiping tears from his face, and from then on it’s hard to keep the tears at bay.

The cemetery is full of families. Mothers sitting by their sons’ graves, talking softly. A group of young men pouring out toasts. I count eight new graves that have been dug in the ten days since Marharyta’s burial. It’s a very dark tragedy that's happening in Ukraine.

Our next stop is the brilliantly-named village of Rannyi Ranok – literally ‘Early Morning’ – home to Tetia Daria and Diadia Ihor, Katia’s sister’s godmother. It was another joyful reunion, and we were again treated to an equally expansive feast.

Daria and Ihor left Myrnohrad in August last year, when the war had come so close that they were living under constant Russian shelling.

“I used to see war on television, on the news, but I never thought I’d see it with my own eyes. Jets flying so low you think they’re going to hit your building. It was terrifying,” Daria told us.

Daria’s son is a sniper in the army. He stepped on a landmine earlier this year, shattering the bones in his leg. Daria worries about him a lot, praying that he will survive the war.

After lunch, we drive an hour and a half to Luhanka, where Lera, Daria’s sister now lives. Having struggled to understand a lot of the Russian being spoken at breakneck and vernacular speeds, I have a vague understanding of what awaits us – that Lera lives with their parents, her husband, and her adult son, who has autism and is unable to work, and that Ada wants to do some work on their house.

Donate

Lera greets us at the door and welcomes us inside. The house smells strongly of damp. Gesturing into the first room on the right, she introduces her husband Zhenia. I look into the room, and see Zhenia lying on a bed. Daria later explains that he was paralysed from the waist down in a botched operation five years ago.

Continuing the house tour, Lera opens the door to what I assume is a closet, but which is actually a small room containing Lera and Daria’s parents. They are unable to walk, and now spend their days in this tiny room. Neither of these rooms have windows that open, and Lera is unable to move them by herself. The three of them spend their days lying in the damp.

Lera at first didn’t think she would be able to leave Myrnohrad because she had no savings with which to buy a place to house her family. But relatives helped out and they managed to scrape together $5,500.

They moved in at the end of summer. When the weather got colder in October, they found out that the central heating system didn’t work. They had no money to fix it, and spent the entire winter sleeping in their coats and hats.

“Everything got damp - the wallpaper, the cabinets, clothes. Everything started to smell of mould,” Daria tells us.

Afterwards we sit outside. Katia says she had been mentally preparing herself all day to see the conditions in which Lera and her family had been living, but it was still too much. She spoke about how unfair it is that Lera and her household have been left to live with almost no support.

Donate

It is hard to imagine how a family could be any more vulnerable. And yet, other than their evacuation, which Katia arranged through an NGO, they have been left to fend for themselves. I later found out that Lera had applied for a form of social security offered to IDPs, but had been rejected on the grounds that she could find a job instead. The entire family is now living off Daria and Lera’s father’s pension, which amounts to UAH 3,000 (£54) a month.

KHARPP is currently in the process of getting the windows replaced, and the heating fixed, as well as doing repairs on the bathroom, which is currently unusable. As we leave Lera’s place, she says that she at first didn’t believe it when she was told about KHARPP, and that someone would come and fix their heating for free.

We drive back to Rannyi Ranok, where Diadia Ihor had fired up the barbecue and was in the process of grilling up platters of meat. I am again singled out for repeated helpings. This could be my role within KHARPP – physically absorbing the extreme hospitality that Ada is treated to in the homes she visits.

As we finish dinner, we hear the sound of a Russian drone flying somewhere in the distance, and we speculate about where it could be headed.

The next day we drive back to Kyiv, arriving late at night. I’m exhausted, and announce to the car that I will sleep well tonight. It wasn’t to be, unfortunately. I was woken at 1am by a ballistic missile hitting Kyiv, and spent the rest of the night in a bomb shelter. Twelve people died in the attack.

Regardless of what happens in the war now, the families we visit will likely never be able to return to their hometowns. The lives they built over decades have been erased, and they have been left trying to maintain a sense of stability and dignity in unfamiliar new environments, with minimal support from anyone outside their immediate family.

I came to Ukraine as a journalist to cover reconstruction. At the start of the year, many were optimistic that Trump would be able to do a deal, the fighting would end, and reconstruction would begin. That optimism seems a long time ago now.

But thinking of reconstruction as some abstract process that will begin once the war is over is not good enough. For the families that KHARPP is working with, reconstruction is a constant, daily struggle, and one in which they have received very little help.

Everyone I met in the space of our three-day trip showed extraordinary resilience. It was deeply moving to be treated with such warmth and hospitality by families who have lost almost everything. But resilience alone isn’t enough. As Ukraine eventually moves toward rebuilding, the question remains whether its most vulnerable displaced citizens will be remembered or forgotten.

Donate

Since our last newsletter, we have completed work on a further selection of houses in Tsupivka, Kharkiv Oblast, following a huge Russian airstrike on the village in February, the first time the village was hit in two and a half years. The day after the strike, I called Zhenia, the head of the village, and asked what we could do, and he requested repairs. Similarly, our team of builders on the ground were all desperate to begin repairs as quickly as possible, once again proving the extent to which the process of rebuilding is as therapeutic as it is physical.

Earlier this month, we visited the village to look at the work. Honestly, the extent of the devastation after the strike was difficult to take in, especially having grown so attached to the village and its few remaining residents in that time. The emotional impact of such a huge strike was also palpable, with the quiet comfort that the residents had found since their liberation from Russian occupation in autumn 2022 shattered. Nonetheless, everyone we spoke to remained firm in their determination to stay in their homes come what may.

Donate

Even more so than the repairs themselves, what we were told again and again was that the fact that we were able to begin work so quickly, and to ensure so totally that the residents of the village knew that they were remembered and cared about, was what was really transformative for people. The fact that western attention has shifted away from Ukraine is no secret, and for people in a village in the far northeast of the country to be reminded that there are people in the UK, and across Europe, the USA, and Australia, who continue to think of them and care about them is hugely powerful.

Over the course of the past month, we have been gifted two plaques as thanks for our work, one from Tsupivka, and the other from Derhachi hromada, which Tsupivka is a part of. It means so much to us to have our work recognised in this way, and we are also very aware that these awards are not just ours, but belong to every single person who has remained committed to our work throughout these past three years. Thank you all.

Refugee housing

This week, we also went to Cherkasy Oblast, in central Ukraine, to visit the houses where we have been completing repairs there.

Donate

For the first two and a half years of the full-scale invasion, Serhii volunteered, evacuating hundreds, if not thousands, of residents from the towns and villages of Donetsk Oblast. He did this in the full knowledge that it was only a matter of time before he would be evacuating his own family, who lived in the village of Rozlyv, in the south west of the oblast. In autumn 2022, that moment finally arrived, and he began the process of moving his parents, grandparents, and siblings further west, abandoning their homes and the farm they had all spent their lives working on. Whilst in the village, loading up his van with possessions, neighbours began to approach him, begging him to take them too, not to abandon them. In the end, over the course of a month, he evacuated almost the entire village.

In February of this year, Serhii, who I met in spring last year in Kharkiv, contacted me to ask for help. He had spent all of his savings on three run-down old cottages in Cherkasy Oblast, to which he had moved twelve members of his extended family. The cottages were in an awful state, with no water or electricity, no bathrooms, no windows, holes in the roof, and various other problems. We provided him with an initial grant to begin repairs. In the six weeks since then, Serhii has begun the repairing of the water systems at the properties, set up the electricity completely, fully built a bathroom in one, and bought all the necessary materials for roof repairs. There is still a lot of work to be done, and we will go back to see the houses in a month or two to see how they have been finished.

The visit to the cottages was bittersweet: on the one hand, it is always wonderful to see the real impact that our work has on people’s lives. On the other, where our work in Kharkiv Oblast has been about enabling people to stay in their homes, and is generally nmet with pure joy by recipients, it is clear that everyone we spoke to this week in Cherkasy Oblast would rather not be there. The process of having to start a new life, forced from your home which was first bombed, and then occupied, now living in far more cramped conditions in a totally new place, all whilst dealing with hugely intense trauma (one of the women told me about the death of the entire family living next door to her, whose home was directly hit), is hellishly difficult. All we can hope is that our contribution makes a small difference in allowing people a liveable space in which to begin this process.

The core tenet of KHARPP’s work has always been attempting to support both those who leave and those who stay behind. The increasingly intense Russian offensive on Donetsk Oblast has meant a new influx of refugees from the cities of Kurakhove, Myrnohrad, and Pokrovsk, and the surrounding villages, over the past months. Many of those refugees are in situations like Serhii’s, spending all their savings on cheap, small cottages in villages in safer areas of Ukraine, and then being left without means to make those properties liveable. Over the next few months, we hope to therefore be able to expand our work to support families like this. This week, we also met Lera, a woman from Myrnohrad, a city situated directly on the frontline, who has evacuated with her paralysed husband, two bedbound parents, and autistic son to central Ukraine, where they are living in a house with no functional heating system or bathroom. We are beginning these repairs over the coming days, and will update on their progress in our next bulletin.

This is a hugely ambitious new project, which will ultimately involve work across Ukraine, and the completion of far more comprehensive repairs than we have thus far been working with. We will only be able to do this with your help, so please keep donating.

Donate

We are also so excited to announce that our work in Kharkiv Oblast is going to be featured at the Ukrainian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, opening in May. The Biennale lasts from May until November this year, and so if you are in Venice over the summer please do take some time to visit.

We also have a message from Andrew Adams, from the Oxford Kharkiv Association, who have consistently supported our work over the last two years:

Calling all KHARPP supporters in striking distance of Oxford. Oxford-Kharkiv would like to see if, by combining forces with everyone else we can achieve even greater things in support of Kharpp. We propose a meeting in Oxford to get to know each other and plan actions. if you're interested please email oxfordkharkiva@gmail.com. Thanks, looking forward to doing more for Ukraine.

Thank you all once again for continuing to support us.

Donate

That being said, the feeling of dread is real and immense. I am sure that all of you, who have stuck with us for so long, are feeling it too, as is anyone who cares about the future of democracy or human rights.

At the Ukraine demonstration in London on 22^nd February, I was very honoured to speak, representing KHARPP. What I said there was this:

What we have witnessed over the past two weeks has been nothing short of the greatest betrayal of a nation by its supposed allies since Poland in 1945. It is easy to sink into despair about this, and to feel that all is lost. But we have no right to do this, when every single day Ukrainians are still fighting and dying for their right to live in freedom and peace, and for ours. When I feel despair, I think of the grandmother I met in a hamlet five kilometres from the russian border in Kharkiv Oblast, who remained in her home through occupation and the relentless shelling that followed, even after the rest of the hamlet had fled. When I asked her why she had stayed, she responded that for as long as she lived on that land, the land would be Ukrainian. I think of my old Ukrainian teacher, who spent the early days of the war handing out her 500-page Ukrainian grammar textbooks for the defenders of Kyiv to use as breast plates. I think of the 79-year-old man from Melitopol, who fled occupation through russian filtration and now lives in Kyiv and builds drones to ensure that nobody else needs to lose their homes. I think of Ivan, an eighteen year old Ukrainian boy who was living in London until last summer, when he decided that he had to act, and was killed defending his homeland a month ago. I think of every single man and woman who has given up their lives to defend us on the frontlines, from teenagers to pensioners. We have no right to despair; our only right is to support. Ukraine remains the shield of Europe, but it is also a place of warmth and of love and of kindness. The darkness we feel now will not last forever. Ukraine will be whole again. The best time to have given Ukraine everything it needs to survive was eleven years ago; the second best was three years ago; but we could also do it now. Britain and the rest of Europe must act, for Ukraine’s sake and for our own.

I believe in this even more now, two weeks on. In our villages, our team continues with repairs, after we paid for windows and doors for eighteen more homes in Tsupivka last week. They will be delivered by the end of the week. Serhii continues with the work on the three cottages in Cherkasy Oblast and we are looking forward to visiting him in the next few weeks and seeing the final results. The front holds and life continues, against the odds. We are not going anywhere: we are with Ukraine for as long as it takes, supporting those who leave and those who stay behind.

With gratitude to all of those who continue to support us and to stand with Ukraine,

Ada

Donate

Donate

With a picture looking ever-bleaker and less certain, we want to thank all of you for continuing to support our work and to stand with Ukraine. When KHARPP was founded at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we could not have anticipated that the war would still be going on after three years, and that the need for international humanitarian support from grassroots groups would continue to be so high.

The pausing of USAID funding earlier this year by President Trump has had a huge impact on the picture of aid in Ukraine, with both international and local groups heavily reliant on US support. We are, thankfully, not one of those groups, having been able to keep up our work relying only on your donations. However, the cutting of this aid has massively increased our workload. When we began our repair programme, we were for the most part the only aid group working in the majority of our villages. Over the past two-and-a-half years, others joined, both small and large, creating a network of support, each group with its own specialties and abilities. Whilst this conglomeration of small groups was never enough to fulfil all the repair needs, it was a huge improvement on the initial situation where we had been working mostly alone. The USAID freeze mean that many of these groups are facing either pausing or permanently stopping their work. As a group with such a firm base of donors, we hope that we will be able to take over at least some of this work, and ensure that the communities we work in don’t suffer too much more as a consequence of this funding loss.

As well as continuing our usual repairs programme around Kharkiv Oblast, with the recent repair of twenty homes in Derhachi (some preliminary photos above, but we will share a proper report in the coming weeks), we have also begun a new project this year. The situation in the south of the Donbas region has worsened hugely over the past few months, leading to a renewed outpouring of refugees. A few weeks ago, we were contacted by Serhii, a former farmer from Rozlyv, a village which is now just 2km from the frontline, and being increasingly pounded everyday. Now a volunteer medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Serhii spent all of his savings on buying three rundown cottages in rural Cherkasy Oblast, central Ukraine, where he moved his family and neighbours. However, the cottages were not, by anyone’s standards, fit for habitation, with no working plumbing, holes not only in the roof but also the walls, and mould growing everywhere. We ultimately decided that the longevity of this project meant that it was worth us funding the total repair of these cottages, to ensure that Serhii’s family and their neighbours have somewhere secure and safe to call their own. Whilst we long to see Ukraine’s territorial integrity restored, and people such as these able to return to their homes in Donetsk Oblast, we recognise that this is unlikely to happen in the short-to-medium term, and thus to be able to enable them to make a new life elsewhere is the most practical support we can provide. Next month, these repairs ought to be complete, and we we look forward to visiting the houses and providing you all with a full update and report.

Donate

It’s really wonderful to be able to start a new project, expanding our help to a new group of people. It’s particularly gratifying to be able to help someone like Serhii, who has spent not just the past three years of full-scale invasion, but the past eleven years of war, helping others, including through evacuations most dangerous parts of the country, aid deliveries across the frontline, and the organisation of homes for other refugees. He has done all of this — working for free — in the knowledge that one day soon the same fate of those he was helping would in all likelihood befall him. Now that day has come, we are so pleased that we can offer him a drop of the same kindness that has been shown him, by helping his family and neighbours. There are thousands of Ukrainians like him, who don’t get the recognition of foreign volunteers like us, but are doing 100x the work, and it is an honour to work alongside them.

We began KHARPP with the motto “helping those who leave, and those who stay behind” and a commitment to flexibility and sensitivity to the changing situation on the ground. In simultaneously assisting those in Kharkiv Oblast who can stay in their homes, and those from Donetsk Oblast who are forced to make new homes elsewhere, we hope that we are seeing this motto through.

One of the cottages Serhii is repairing.

We’d also like to draw your attention to two other events happening in Oxford over the coming weeks. The Oxford Kharkiv Association is hosting a ceilidh on 1 March with proceeds going to KHARPP, whilst, on 15th March, for the third year in a row, a “Reeling for Ukraine” event will take place at Hertford College, Oxford, kindly sponsored by Payne Hicks Beach LLP. A huge thanks to the organisers of both events - and if you are in the area, make sure to head down to one (or both!).

Donate

Today there will also be a march in London demanding the removal of Russian troops from Ukraine, of which KHARPP is a co-organiser and where we will be speaking. With apologies for the very short notice, we would love to see as many people as possible joining us there.

There is no pretending that this period is easy. In many ways, it has been the most difficult few weeks since the beginning of the war. However, we do not have the right to give up or to walk away; as long as Ukraine is fighting, we will be standing with it, and we urge you to stay with us. The bleakness is very real, but there is light too, and we hope that we will be continue to be a small part of enabling that light, with your help. Please stick with us, and keep donating, so that we can keep supporting communities that might otherwise get left behind.

Donate

As our last newsletter mentioned, this autumn we began work in Kam’ianka, in the east of Kharkiv Oblast. This week we visited the village, going to see the houses we had completed and organising the delivery of firewood for the winter months, generously provided to us by Habitat for Humanity.

Kam’ianka is in a noticeably worse state than even the most damaged villages we had worked in previously. Driving into the village, it is impossible to believe that anyone still lives there, with every house seemingly destroyed. However, as almost three years of war has taught us, even the most destroyed settlement will always have some people left in it: those too old, disabled, or frightened to leave, and those forced to come back, either out of poverty or simply a desire to return home. Currently, Kam’ianka has a population of 90 residents, with the vast majority of the pre-war population of over 1000 still unable to return home. Many, however, are based in Izium, which is only a few kilometres away, and regularly return to tend to their gardens (which they have generally demined themselves). Though the village is now peaceful, having gone over two years since it was last hit, nonetheless the residents continue to live with the traumas they underwent in those first six months of war, where sixty of their neighbours died.

Donate

One such neighbour was Olha’s elder son, who was killed when a rocket hit the house he sat in with his mother, father, and brother during the second week of the war. Olha has remained in Kam’ianka, moving into her son-in-law’s house on the other side of the village. The locals call this part of the village ‘little Switzerland’, because of the hills which overlook it and the river which run through it. The house she moved into, whilst in a better state than that which she left behind, nonetheless didn’t have a single window. We are incredibly pleased that we have been able to provide Olha, her husband, and her younger son (who has been left disabled following the strike which killed his brother) with warmth this winter, both through the provision of new windows and enough firewood to see them through the coldest months.

Similar horror stories exist throughout Kam’ianka. Zina, another resident who we provided with both wood and windows, was born in the village. In her twenties she moved to Mariupol, where she married and had a son. She and her husband separated, and when her son grew up he joined the army. He was still serving in 2022, when the full-scale invasion began, and was taken into Russian captivity, where he remains. Fleeing Mariupol, Zina first moved to Pokrovsk, in the west of the Donetsk region. This summer, with the frontline moving towards Pokrovsk at an alarming rate, she packed her bags and moved again, this time back to Kam’ianka, to the house where she was born.

Before the war, Kam’ianka was a farming community, and the majority of residents kept livestock. The heavy shelling at the start of the war saw almost all the village’s animal population killed, and several residents have converted what were once barns into homes. Polina and her husband are two such residents, and invited us to have lunch with them in their barn, which they have spent the last six months making inhabitable. We are very pleased to have been able to provide the windows as the finishing touch, as well as firewood for the winter.

Our work in the village has been made possible through the unwavering commitment of one local resident, Larysa, who dedicates her time, totally unpaid, to ensuring that her neighbours receive the aid they need to survive. Larysa was born in the village, and has lived there her entire life, with the exception of the first year of the war, when she fled to Odesa. Having returned home she found her house totally destroyed after a direct hit by a missile. She and her husband spent six months rebuilding it themselves. Tragically, exactly a year ago her husband was in a horrific car accident outside the village, which has left him paralysed from the waist-down. Larysa is now his full-time carer, as well as looking after all her neighbours. To be able to work alongside people like her is honestly an honour, and an important reminder that what we are doing, whilst important, is nothing compared to the sacrifices being made by Ukrainians every day as they support their communities.

Donate

Beyond this, the start of our work in Kam’ianka has once again shed light on the extent of suffering that has been unleashed on Ukraine. For every home repaired, there are a hundred which remain broken and destroyed. Yet, it has also shown us how much we can still help. For now, we can proudly say that, thanks to your donations, there is not a single resident of Kam’ianka living without windows. In the face of this level of horror, it is easy to feel powerless, but we hope that we have provided Kamianka’s residents with a small piece of comfort and warmth.

This week, we have additionally been travelling around Derhachi. The situation there has improved hugely since the summer, and a semblance of peace seems to have returned, but there are still numerous families living without windows in freezing conditions. We have collected a list of houses where we hope to complete repairs before the new year and will begin taking measurements next week.

Away from rebuilding, we’d also like to express huge thanks to Charlbury St Mary’s, who have fundraised for a replacement vehicle for the administration in Slatyne, after the attack on their office in summer destroyed theirs. We will be purchasing the vehicle next week.

As we approach Christmas and New Year, the weather in Ukraine has dropped well below freezing. Much of the country is without electricity, and the situation at the front is worsening on a daily basis. Being able to provide the small respite in people’s lives that we do is an honour and a privilege. More and more, the feeling that it is not just the wood or the windows that is transformative, but the knowledge that people abroad care about them, and that, even after almost three years of full-scale war, people still want to help them. Thank you all so much for sticking with us thus far. This Christmas, please consider donating to continue to support these communities into 2025.

Donate

Зі різдвом! Merry Christmas!

Donate

We have also decided to expand our work to a different area of the Kharkiv region. Earlier in the summer, we drove through a village called Kam’ianka, which is situated on the border of Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts. It’s hard to put into words quite how hellish it is there. Having spent two years working continually in the same selection of villages, and seeing constant progress and improvements, it was heart-breaking to remember quite how devastated so many communities still are. Like most of the other villages we work in, Kam’ianka was occupied for the first months of the war, before being liberated two years ago. The occupation of the village was particularly brutal, with every single house having been lived in by Russian soldiers and not a single one left undamaged. Since liberation in September 2022, the village has been largely forgotten. It is an almost-three-hour drive away from Kharkiv, meaning that volunteer groups tend not to work there. With a pre-war population of 1200, during occupation just five families, comprising a total of 16 people, remained. Currently, there are forty households living in the village, totalling eighty people. Most of the village still has no electricity, and there is no gas provision at all. Beginning a project there seemed like an impossible feat, given the difficulty in accessing the village, however we are pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the Ukrainian charities BASE UA and East SOS, we are this month preparing repairs to ten houses in the village, including all those lived in by children. We will be providing windows and doors, whilst BASE UA and East SOS will be repairing roofs and other essential aspects of the homes. We hope very much that this will be the beginning of a longer running project in Kam’ianka, and that you will support us in making that happen.

As well as our repair work, we have also this month provided protective equipment to the police force in Myrnohrad, a city in the Donetsk region which is now just four kilometres from the frontline and which has, over the summer, become one of the hottest spots in the entire war. This equipment, specifically helmets and protective vests, will allow the police to carry out evacuations as safely as possible. We received this request via the sister of one of our volunteers in Ukraine, who is a member of the police force in question, and who now spends her time helping the elderly and infirm to evacuate both from Myrnohrad and the surrounding villages. As the Russian advance on that area of the front continues to move at a quick and steady pace, her work is vital. At KHARPP, we have always tried to work under the principle of supporting both those who leave, and those who stay behind. In this case, our hope is to help not only those who are leaving, but those who are risking their lives to help them to do so.

Donate

I would like to end this newsletter with a tribute to David Knowles, a friend to KHARPP, and to all of Ukraine, who passed away earlier this month, aged only 32. I know that many of our readers and supporters heard about our work through the Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest podcast, which David founded and presented, on a near-daily basis for over two years. Last winter, David invited me to speak on the podcast, and the resulting interview led to the largest influx of donations we have ever seen. Still, on a near-weekly basis we receive emails from supporters saying that they found our work via the podcast. Following that interview, David stayed in touch. He always checked in on our team, and the communities we support, and KHARPP ended up being featured several more times on the show. He had planned to come to Kharkiv and go around the villages we support, and to follow up on the families who were supported with the initial load of Telegraph-related donations. From those initial donations alone, we repaired over 60 houses. With this being the impact of just one of the hundreds of podcast episodes which David organised and presented, it is impossible to imagine how many lives he must have transformed. We are so grateful to him, and want to send all our love and support to his family, friends, and colleagues.

A word on the current situation: the Russian ground assault on the region, although initially relatively successful, was quickly halted by Ukrainian forces. Of the villages that we work in, none were taken, however all have suffered varying levels of damage. Thankfully the majority of the work we have done remains intact, however the situation remains tense and the feelings of hope in the villages are definitely muted, replaced by a grim acceptance that the war will continue to rage for the foreseeable future, and people must choose either to leave or to simply try to live the best they can within it. We have spent the past week touring our villages and making plans for how to support them going forward.

Donate

Over the past two months since the new offensive began our priority has been support with energy infrastructure, however even now in the deep heat of Ukrainian summer, thoughts are turning to the colder months. Having travelled round the villages, speaking both to the administrations and to the residents who remain (which is, incidentally, most of them), we have made the decision to, barring any dramatic developments, restart work at the end of August. Like in autumn 2022 when we first started our repairs programme, our priority is once again going to be winterization: providing the minimal repairs needed for people to survive the winter in their homes. Our priority is people who have unavoidable reasons for being unable to evacuate. In almost all the areas we operate, the situation has generally stabilised and some smaller scale work is able to resume, with the heartbreaking exceptions of Mali and Velyki Prokhody, now firmly back on the frontline. For the time-being, we will be working in Tsyrkuny, Slatyne and Derhachi.

One household we have committed to supporting is Mykola’s, or as he is generally known, Diadia Kolia (Uncle Kolia), in Tsyrkuny. In his seventies, Mykola is famous in Tsyrkuny for his committed volunteering. Having lost his wife and son from Covid before the war, once the invasion began he dedicated himself to supporting his community, taking in abandoned animals and delivering food to the bedbound around the village. I received a call from Kolia a few weeks ago. He had received my number from a friend in the village for whom we had done repairs a year ago. He explained that his house, in which he lived with his sister, Liuba, and their bedbound ninety-three-year-old mother, had been totally destroyed by a Russian glide bomb. Luckily, he and his sister had been in the garden, whilst their mother had been in the outhouse, and all survived with minimal injuries. The outhouse was also mainly unharmed, suffering roof damage and having its windows blown out. The local community rallied to help them, fundraising to buy materials for roof repair. They were not able to raise enough for windows however, and so Kolia asked if we could help. My initial question was whether they would consider evacuating. Kolia explained that, given his mother’s age and disabilities, it was not feasible for them financially, physically, or, for that matter, emotionally. They will stay in their outhouse come what may. When I visited them, he told me that several of the cats they had rescued throughout the war had been killed in the attack – but that a few days before a soldier had brought them an abandoned kitten he had found in the Donetsk region, and so his volunteer work continues.

Donate

Among the many in the villages unwilling or unable to leave their homes are a large number of internally displaced people. Much of the movement of people due to the war is not country-to-country, but village-to-village, or sometimes even street-to-street. People move just a few miles up or down the road in order to find some vague semblance of safety. Raisa and her husband Malak are originally from Kharkiv, where they lived on the top floor of a highrise in the North Saltivka region. In the first week of the war, as they hid in the metro, a rocket hit their building, totally destroying their apartment and everything inside. They then moved to Malak’s native Azerbaijan, however after a while Raisa decided she couldn’t cope being so far away from home. The trauma of the first months of the war in Kharkiv had induced epilepsy in Raisa, but now she felt that the stress of homesickness was making it worse. A family member had moved to Germany and left their home in Tsyrkuny empty, and so last year Raisa and Malik moved there. The four-room house had been lived in by fourty Russian soldiers whilst under occupation, and they still haven’t finished cleaning the mess that was left. When the soldiers left, they also stole the radiators. On top of this, the house has no windows. Last winter, they lived in the house filled with frost, and neither is quite sure how they survived, but both are confident they won’t be able to do it again. Nonetheless, they are not willing to be displaced again, and are determined to stay in Tsyrkuny until such a time when they might be able to receive compensation for their apartment and move back to Kharkiv, however this is unlikely to happen before the end of the war.

Donate

Over the past week, we have visited thirty such homes where people are unable to leave and where we have agreed to provide the necessary repairs for them to see through the winter months.

Our other work

• Zhenia, the Slatyne starosta, has also asked for our help in purchasing a new car for the administration to be able to deliver humanitarian aid to the areas closest to the frontline and border. A horrific attack on the Slatyne administration building last month, which thankfully did not kill anyone working there, destroyed all the official vehicles. He has asked for an ordinary, small minivan, so that local volunteers are able to make these incredibly dangerous journeys to support those in the most precarious areas as safely as possible. We have sourced an appropriate vehicle in western Ukraine and are looking to fundraise £4,000 for its purchase and delivery to Slatyne. We are also looking at options in the UK and the EU. This week, we recorded a video with Zhenia describing the need:

Donate

If you might be able to help specifically with this need, please do get in touch with us at contact@kharpp.com.

• We continue to support Anastasiia, the doctor from Vovchansk who has relocated her clinic to Kharkiv and continues to work for her community in displacement. We have bought £2,500 worth of medicines for her to distribute for free to her patients, as well as equipment furniture for her clinic.

  

Donate

• We continue to provide Starlink satellite internet access to five different village hubs, as well as to deliver fuel across the region to ensure generator-supplied energy can be relied upon. Following the attack on Slatyne’s administration building, we are also helping to restock the administration with the items which were destroyed.

  

  Fuel and a lawn mower delivered last week to Slatyne.

Donate

As we reach the grim mark of two and a half years of war, with no end in sight for the time being, we are more grateful than ever for all of your support. That we are able to keep working, and to keep providing sustained and reliable assistance to these communities means so much both to us and to them.We are particularly grateful to all those who go to the effort of hosting fundraisers for us and want to express our huge gratitude to everyone involved in the Cambridge Kupala Fest, who hosted an event in aid of KHARPP last month. In particular thank you to Piotr Czosnyka and the Polish Waves Radio, Elmaz Asan, Dvi Doli, Tetiana Kysliak, Malva Choir, Maciej M. Pawlikowski, UKR Books, Vadym Granovskyi, Ukrainian Wine Company, Olha Havrina, Anastasiia Palashynska, Valeriya Korbina, UAID, Peter Nixon, Natalia, Halyna, Iryna, Tetiana, St Giles’ Church, and all the volunteers who helped make the event happen.

Once again, thank you all for sticking with us. This has been an unspeakably difficult couple of months, but your support has enabled us to keep going, and for our work to remain impactful. As summer slowly draws to a close and the third full winter of the full-scale invasion approaches, stick with us, and help us to continue to help the people we work with. Whilst we are so grateful that the vast majority of our work has been undamaged in the new offensive, we are also acutely aware of what has been lost in Mali and Velyki Prokhody. Looking at these two villages, where we are no longer able to operate and where the residents have been forced to evacuate, we are nonetheless so proud of the work we could do there. We can’t predict what the future will be in Mali and Velyki Prokhody, but that for over a year and a half between their liberation in September 2022 and the new offensive in May 2024, people were able to come back and briefly experience life in their own homes, on their own land, is something we are so proud to have contributed to. The sentiments expressed by all the residents of the villages that we have spoken to has been unreservedly one of gratitude, that they were able to buy some extra time in their homes when it seemed so unlikely in autumn 2022. It is thanks to your donations that that was able to happen, and it means more than can be put into words here. I wanted to end this newsletter with this photo that Sveta, the starosta of Mali and Velyki Prokhody, shared with me on Orthodox Easter this year, just a week before the new offensive started, to remember the life that had come back to those villages, and that we hope more than anything will be able to come back once more soon.

Donate

Underlined are the villages where we predominantly work. Red shows the newly occupied territory, green shows territory that has been occupied and liberated since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

We have now paused our repairs programme, waiting out what the next few weeks bring. Windows for the House of Culture/youth club in Tsyrkuny were delivered earlier this week having been ordered two weeks ago, and will be safely stored until we, along with the local administration, decide the situation is stable enough to install them. This is obviously hugely difficult to stomach, especially as just last week we passed 800 homes repaired. However, what is being stressed by every official and resident of every village we work in who I have spoken to this week is that this does not undermine the importance of the work that we have done. Thousands of people survived winters because of this work, and the hope we have provided to these communities has been immense. The risk of a new offensive was always there, but giving people time in their homes before it came has provided so much. I also don’t want this to sound fatalistic. The majority of the places we work are stable, and we hope they remain as such. The situation is bad, but over the last few days it seems to have stabilised, and in the coming weeks it may turn around – especially if American weapons arrive in time. However, regardless of what happens next, we are now working with local administrations to temporarily reorient our work until such a time when it becomes clear what comes next.

I spent the last week in Kharkiv, going around our villages and assessing the needs there, and so will provide a brief update on the various areas that we have been focussing on.

Donate

Medicines and medical equipment

The worst of the fighting has been going on in Vovchansk, a city to the north-east of the region which was once home to 20,000 people before being occupied at the beginning of the war, liberated in September 2022, and relentlessly pounded by Russian artillery ever since. This is not an area that KHARPP has worked in before, however early last week we received a request from a local GP, Anastasiia, who had fled to Kharkiv before the occupation in 2022, but has continued to travel regularly to her hometown with her clinic. Thousands of people have been evacuated from the area to Kharkiv itself in the last ten days, many of them Anastasiia’s former patients. Anastasiia’s clinic is working nonstop (and for free) to help those fleeing her hometown. She wrote to KHARPP requesting a whole list of basic medicines, since these refugees are unable to buy their own. Within a few days we had delivered the entire list directly to her clinic. Anastasiia had written to multiple organisations requesting help, all of which either ignored her message, or responded saying that they had their own in-house doctors who she could send her patients to. For Anastasiia’s patients, however, she is providing not just medical care, but some sense of familiarity and consistency, which an anonymous doctor from an aid organisation just wouldn’t be able to do. We’ve committed to keep supporting Anastasiia and her work for as long as they need it, as well as buying new basic medical equipment, laptops, etc. since much of theirs has been destroyed.

Anastasiia with the medicine we have provided, with the coat of arms of Vovchansk behind her.

Donate

Accommodation for Internally Displaced People

So far, the evacuation of civilians from frontline villages has been relatively smooth. However, there is increasing concern that if Russia has more success, even more villages will have to be evacuated and will stretch the system even further. In particular, if the Russian army manages to cross the border at Kozacha Lopan, the majority of the villages we work in will have to be evacuated. So far, they have been unable to do so, and we are hoping this remains the case, but also preparing for the worst.

KHARPP has received a request from a shelter for IDPs in Kharkiv (most IDPs don’t travel any further) to repair the windows of a former student dormitory to house further IDPs, as well as to purchase a 20kW generator. Touring this dormitory is very bizarre, with most of the students having left in a hurry and not returned since, abandoning their possessions in their rooms. Nonetheless, the university administration along with the city has done an excellent job organising the other dormitories their house IDPs in, and so supporting them to continue this work feels like a positive way to help people from our villages keep going.

We have also received a request to provide much more comprehensive repairs to an abandoned dormitory in central Ukraine, with the intention of moving people further west. In the next few days, we will go and tour the site to assess the level of repairs required and determine the support we can offer.

For the time being, we have promised the heads of the villages were we work that anyone who wants to leave the area, but is worried about accommodation, can rely on us, whether this be through the repairs of dormitories, or through renting temporary accommodation until the situation clarifies itself. Inevitably, people are very reluctant to leave their homes again, and we cannot force them to, however our aim is to ensure that people are aware that they will not be left our in the cold if they do.

The dormitory in Kharkiv where we have been requested to support with repairs and a generator.

Donate

Energy support

Since this new incursion, the main request we have received from our villages is for more energy support. Whilst the situation with electricity remains relatively stable, even after the infrastructure attacks six weeks ago, Russian tactics are always to destroy the electricity of any area they hope to occupy, cutting them off from the rest of Ukraine and increasing terror in the residents. Last week was therefore spent delivering new generators and portable power stations, as well as several hundred litres of fuel around the villages, including giving one portable power station to the police in Derhachi, who have been organising evacuations from the villages currently under attack (and have already lost electricity), and can now take it with them for these evacuations to make sure they stay connected. The electricity in Derhachi is also cut out for several hours a day, further hindering their ability to complete their essential work, so we hope this will go some way to easing the situation they have once again been forced into.

Fuel, portable power stations, and a generator for Slatyne.

Donate

Windows

The emergency fundraiser launched six weeks ago for those whose homes were damaged after the attack on our team’s street in Derhachi was a huge success. Once again, thank you all. These were, of course, not the circumstances we would have liked to have visited the homes of the recipients, however it was nonetheless good to speak to them and to hear about their plans. Invariably, when it was suggested that KHARPP could support with evacuation, people refused. The refrain across the villages this week has been that unless there is an immediate risk of occupation, people are not willing to leave their homes, no matter what state they may be in. Nonetheless, they have our contact details and know to get in touch if they need. For now, however, they are all enjoying some vague normality in their homes, which, regardless of what may come next, is something priceless.

This newsletter is very long, but I just wanted to end with one story of one of the recipients from our last order in Derhachi. Natalia, prior to the war, lived with her son, Misha, in their large house at the end of the town. In February 2022, she fled to western Ukraine, whilst Misha joined the army to defend his home. Last year, Misha was severely wounded. He was in a coma for a time, and had a series of operations, before moving home to recover. Natalia returned home at the same time to care for him, bringing with her a cat she had rescued from the street in western Ukraine. Tragically, despite his mother’s care, Misha died after just a few weeks at home. Natalia decided then that she would not be leaving her home again, wanting to stay under the roof where her son was not only born, but also died. When, in March, the glide bomb hit her next-door neighbour’s house directly, shattering all her windows and blowing out the wall of the attack wall of Misha’s room, that cat she had adopted in western Ukraine was in the middle of giving birth. Miraculously, all the kittens survived. The traumatic experience of the attack has not changed Natalia’s mind on her decision to remain in Derhachi, where she plans to stay come-what-may, with her new arrivals, and with Misha close-by. There are thousands of people like Natalia, who serve to remind us that telling people to evacuate is never that simple. Nonetheless she has our contact details if she needs them.

Donate

The past ten days have brought back the horrors of the first days of the war for so many people. There’s a palpable feeling of heartbreak that is reverberating around Kharkiv and the villages, that they are once again at risk of occupation after putting so much into building their lives back, but alongside this there is one of defiance. For KHARPP, there is also a sense of loss, that four of the villages we put so much time, money, and energy into helping to repair are once again being emptied of their residents. However, we remain positive, holding out for the weapons from the USA to arrive quickly and assist the Ukrainian troops in pushing the Russians back across the border, and prevent them from making any more crossings. For now, we stand firm, continuing to support these communities which we are so embedded in in whatever way they might need. Thank you for sticking with us. Things are very dark now, but we hope for better days ahead. Please keep supporting us, as we keep supporting these communities.

Donate

Subscribe now

Donate

One happy note is that we have really seen the results of using high quality materials these last few weeks. After the attack in Derhachi, our contractor had several visits from previous recipients of our windows there, who told her that all their windows had broken – other than those we had provided. That’s not to say that they are explosion-proof, of course, but it does go to show that investing in the highest quality products, in line with all building regulations, can make a big difference.

Looking into the coming months, on top of our regular programme of home repairs, we are expecting to begin work assisting with the renovation of a youth club in the de-occupied village of Tsyrkuny where an amazing team of locals are coming together to provide free classes, therapy, and generally a space to exist, for teenagers who have remained in/returned to the village. The mental strain on children and young people living in areas like these is huge, and this is essential work. The local team have managed to fundraise themselves for a new roof for the damaged building, but have asked for our help regarding the windows and doors. We have also had a request to build a bomb shelter in Slatyne: notably, only two of the villages we work in have their own bomb shelters, leaving residents with only their basements to hide in in the event of attack. This was inadequate to begin with, but with Russia now using aviation bombs which can cause craters as deep as five-storey buildings, it is now completely pointless. A high-quality shelter built to approved state standards can be built for as little as £25,000, and so we hope that we will be able to achieve this goal by the end of the summer.

Finally, to any of our readers based in/around London, tomorrow (Tuesday 23^rd April) a vintage sale is being hosted by Nicola Shulman and Gina Marcou, who have generously donated seven rails worth of designer women’s clothes in aid of KHARPP at 72 Glebe Place, SW3 5JB from 3PM-10PM. It will be £5 on the door. Please do come and say hello and show your support – several of our trustees will be there and we would love to meet you in person!

As always, thank you all for your continued support. Please keep giving, and so we can keep supporting communities here for as long as it takes.

Donate

Donate

On Monday, the area where our contractor, Viktoria, as well as one of our builders, Yura, live in Derhachi was hit by an aerial bomb, destroying two houses totally and knocking out all the windows and doors on the other side of the street to Viktoria’s. It could have been a lot worse and thankfully nobody was killed, but this has understandably shaken the community hugely. The attack seems to have been random; Derhachi has not been seriously targeted for a year and a half, and this is a totally residential area with no military targets anywhere nearby.

Donate for Derhachi

Our work is extremely localised, and even aside from the people here who we actively employ, everyone in this community plays a quiet, vital role in it. When the KHARPP website crashed a month ago, it was someone on this street who sat for two hours with me putting it back up. When the KHARPP car broke down a month ago, it was people on this street who first came out to try and fix it themselves, and then when this wasn’t possible helped to tow it to the local garage, and then to collect it when it was ready a few weeks later and drive it back. They have welcomed us with open arms, and a visit to our contractor rarely passes without a neighbour bringing over a cake or homemade wine. Last week when the electricity and water were knocked out in Kharkiv, the street came together to collect bottles to go and fill with water from a local well and to be distributed amongst neighbours who needed it. We always joke that the street has everyone you could possibly need to get through life, and it really is true that the street has everyone you could possibly need to run a charity.

Our policy on the whole remains that we do not work in places which have been hit in the last three months, and we understand that donors give to us on this basis, however in this case, with a community we know so well and who has done so much for us having been affected, we are hoping to separately raise funds for these repairs. So far we have received direct requests from twelve households for windows and doors from elderly, disabled, and unemployed residents. The local administration has forwarded on requests from a further eight. We have not yet done measurements but imagine the cost will come to around £10,000 (£500 per house). We are also anticipating this number will rise: fifty homes were damaged and very few people are in a position to pay for repairs themselves or are eligible for compensation. Just as our work is impossible without your support, it is also impossible without the support of this community, and we really hope that we will be able to collect together the funds needed to support them.

We understand the concerns you may have about donating for repairs somewhere which has only just been targeted, hence separately fundraising for this particular emergency situation. However, unfortunately this is the reality right now. People need to be able to live in their homes and go on with their lives; this is not a frontline area and instead is a bustling town to which 97% of residents have already returned. The first night after the attack, the neighbourhood emptied out as most people spent the night on friends’ sofas in other parts of the town or in Kharkiv, but now, two days later, the majority have moved back, and are living in homes without windows — and without electricity and water for several hours a day, as a result of the energy rationing introduced after last week’s infrastructure attacks.

Any donations, big or small, will make a huge difference as we do our best to help this community get past this new trauma. Thank you very much.

Donate for Derhachi

These are videos taken by Anna, another neighbour who often volunteers to help with the bureaucratic aspects of our work, for example making sure we get before and after photos of every house:

The medical tent powered by our generator.

The reason I came to Kharkiv this week was to go round the houses from our last order, in Tsupivka, Prudianka, Slatyne, and Rus’ki Tyshky, as well as took look around the houses which make up our next order, which is focussed only on Slatyne. Most of this time was spent talking to the recipients of our support, and hearing their stories, a couple of which I will share here.

In Slatyne, I met Oksana, who lives on the last house on Vulytsia Myra – literally, Peace Street – with her teenage son, Artem. It is effectively the last house in Slatyne. To either side fields stretch out. Before the full-scale invasion, her long-term partner lived with them. Her daughter, Anna, and son-in-law lived two villages north, in Tsupivka. Her son-in-law worked as a border guard. When the full-scale invasion began, the family scattered. Oksana’s partner joined the army; Oksana and her son fled to Italy; Oksana’s daughter and her husband became trapped in Tsupivka, which was occupied,

One day, armed Russian men came to their door, having been tipped off about Anna’s husband’s work. They claimed they were coming to ‘evacuate them’ to Russia, since Tsupivka was being heavily shelled. Anna and her husband tried to refuse, but ultimately were forced to cross the border into Russia. When there, they were separated. Anna is not sure if her husband has been killed or imprisoned, but she has not heard from him in two years. She made her way back through Belarus to Ukraine alone, and now lives in Kharkiv.

Meanwhile, whilst Oksana and her son were in Italy, she got a call to say that her partner had been injured. A local church raised the money to get her a ticket back to Ukraine, where she arrived in time to see him before he ultimately died. War widows are entitled to compensation in Ukraine, however since they were not officially married, Oksana has not received anything. Before the war, Oksana worked on a farm as a fruit picker in the summers, and as a secretary in Kharkiv in the winters. The farm where she worked has been mined, whilst the firm in Kharkiv has been closed, the director having fled the country. So, her and Artem live alone, in the last house, without windows or even a working front door. We measured their windows this week, and, so long as the infrastructure attacks subside, will be able to install their windows and door by mid-April. It’s a small comfort compared to the hell they’ve lived through, but it’s something. The repairs will cost £450.

Donate today

I also went to visit Olga and Volodymyr, an elderly couple whose homes we repaired in our last batch. Olga and Volodymyr were both born in Slatyne, and have lived in their small apartment there together for over fifty years. In their eighties and childless, they were evacuated to a village south of Kharkiv, away from the fighting, two years ago. There, they were provided with a small cottage to live in. Without a car and with limited mobility to make a day trip there and back, they were unable to return to their apartment at any point to survey the damage. A neighbour called them one day and informed them that their windows had been blown out and offered to board them up. Olga and Volodymyr had little hope at this point of ever been able to return home; their combined pensions of under £100 per month wouldn’t even make a dent in the cost of repairs needed. Both had accepted the high likelihood that they would never see their home again.

We have now repaired all the windows in their apartment, and they have moved home. Both are very unwell. Mine and Olga’s conversation was regularly interrupted by her coughing fits, and Volodymyr had a mini-stroke whilst they were living in the other village, which has weakened him significantly. The war has taken its toll on people’s health across Ukraine, and especially in areas such as this, where rates of heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are sky-rocketing. Nonetheless, that they are now able to be in their own home is a huge relief for both of them. I asked if they had considered staying in the free cottage to the south of the city, since the danger of further attacks there is so much lower, and they looked at me like I was insane. ‘Home is home’, Olga said. Repairs on their apartment cost £400.

Donate today

Volodymyr playing dominoes under a window we provided.

When one thinks of a refugee, generally one thinks of someone who has moved countries, from danger to safety. The reality is that most refugees are internally displaced, often just moving from one village to another. This week, we installed windows in a house in Prudianka. The residents of the house – a mother, father, and son – have lived in Germany for two years now, and have no immediate plans to return, since the school in Prudianka is completely destroyed.

In the house now live the father’s parents, Anna and Serhii. Up until last week, they have been living in Kozacha Lopan, the last Ukrainian village before the border with Russia, which endured six months of occupation until September 2022 and has been shelled pretty much every day since. As of last week, the Russians have also started pounding it with aerial bombs. We don’t provide repairs there, since the situation remains far too unstable and any windows we installed would be unlikely to last more than a few weeks. Anna and Serhii’s house was badly damaged there a few weeks ago, and so they ultimately decided to move to their son’s family house. There, they will at least have some peace, even if still surrounded by destruction. They will be close enough to Kozacha Lopan to be able to plant their vegetable garden in the next few weeks, but able to sleep somewhere not under active shelling. It also ensures that their son’s family will have somewhere to come back to, if and when they may choose to return. The repairs cost £780.

Donate today

Replacing windows in Prudianka.

Our last order averaged at £531 per house for repairs, consisting of windows and some front doors. Our next order of 16 homes in Slatyne averages at closer to £560 per home, as it includes houses with a larger amount of damage. Maybe this seems like a lot, but when put into perspective looking at the impact we are having, not just on individual lives but on communities as a whole, it is a small price to pay. In Slatyne, with the exception of the homes which are fully destroyed and there is no hope of people being able to return to them, there are now only fourty houses left without windows. We hope that, with your help, within the next few months we will be able to complete repairs on all of these. Attacks on Kharkiv are increasing again, but our villages thankfully remain quiet, despite the issues with electricity and phone signal these attacks cause. More than ever, the hope that repairs can provide is essential to keeping these communities going through the darkest times.

Thank you all for sticking with us, and thank you especially to all of our supporters who send us month donations. The stability of these is a large part of what enables us to keep going. As we move into spring, we want to be able to ramp up our efforts, but we can only do this with your help. Please keep giving and sharing our work.

Donate today

PS. Filmmaker Johnathan Duran joined us in Kharkiv Oblast last month and shot some wonderful footage of the villages where we work, which is now being edited into a series of short videos, included the below about Slatyne, and our decision to focus on a small number of villages.

The question therefore comes up as to why we keep going with repairs, when destruction continues to be imposed across Ukraine. This question is quickly answered when speaking to the people whom we help. In our last newsletter, we spoke about hope and I want to give a brief account of how our work with your support has brought back hope to one village.

Donate

Around a third of our repairs have been done in Slatyne, a village which was never occupied but sat on the frontline for six months, leading to the damage or total destruction of approximately 60-70% of buildings, including 700 private homes, with 200 completely destroyed. Driving through many streets in Slatyne a year and a half ago, you were met with a post-apocalyptic hell. Only 200 people remained, most scared to leave their basements. The village also felt forgotten. There was little hope among the residents that real, sustainable aid would reach them. For the six months they had been on the frontline, neither fire service nor ambulances were allowed into the village to deal with the consequences of the shelling. The reasons behind this are understandable: the Russian army is known for its use of ‘double-tap’ attacks, where they will strike a building, and wait for the emergency services to arrive in order to strike again and maximalise casualties. Nonetheless, the consequence of these six months of relative abandonment whilst under sustained and indiscriminate shelling had led to a degree of suspicion and resentment among the remaining residents. Conducting repairs in the village seemed like an insurmountable task, but one that we ought to try to undertake.

Subscribe now

Going to the village now, there are some streets which seem almost untouched by war: every house has windows and doors and fully repaired roofs (the latter predominantly thanks to our friends at Livyj Bereh). There is of course still much work to be done, but with 2000 people now having returned to Slatyne (only 200 having remained whilst they were on the frontline) the village is slowly coming back to life. It’s a long way off from the 6000 who once lived there, but it’s a start. The village shopping area has been almost completely destroyed, however the shops which still stand have reopened, even without windows, alongside a temporary post office in a portacabin. The train station, completely hollowed out by a direct hit, cannot function, but the train to and from Kharkiv still passes through four times a day, so the residents who return can go to work. Over two hundred children now live in the village. Being a small part of the reinvigoration of Slatyne is the greatest honour, and every single person who has donated to our repairs scheme can take some credit in this. Not only has the physical impact of the home repairs throughout the village enabled people to move home, but the hope that these repairs have provided has been transformative. In the words of the head of the village, Zhenya, our work lets people know that they are not alone or forgotten, and that those worst days when emergency services and volunteers were forbidden from reaching them are over.

This is not to say that life is easy in Slatyne. It has been a year and a half since the last time the village was hit, but the rumble of artillery strikes at the border, just 20km away serve as a constant reminder that the threat has not yet passed. Almost all of the young men from the village are on the frontlines, and it is hard to find anyone who has not lost a loved one in the war, be this on the battlefield, under shelling, or from the strokes and heart attacks which have multiplied since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The destruction of the farms around the village and the factory where many of the residents worked has caused huge poverty. But all of this points back to the need to give people hope. We cannot know where this war will go next; there is no point pretending that the danger has past, no matter how much we can pray that this is the case, but we can give people a little bit of their lives back, so that whilst they continue to live through this hell, they are doing so with light and warmth and comfort.

Donate

So, once again we ask you to stick with us. Together, the difference we can make is unimaginably huge. We can’t do this without your help; two years into the war we remain entirely funded by your donations. Every penny you give goes directly to where it’s needed most, so please keep giving and keep fundraising. Thank you all, and slava Ukraini!

Subscribe now

In a lot of ways, the mood is depressed. The war drags on, almost into its third year, and people are exhausted. They have lost so much in these areas; homes destroyed, family members killed at the front, futures ripped apart. There is no forgetting the war here; even if you close your eyes to the destruction around you and turn on the radio, being in an area relatively close to the front means shows are interrupted by messages sent out in the hope that they reach the radios of the Russian soldiers who continue to shell the border constantly, urging them to surrender. Nonetheless, the residents of these areas remain determined and rebuilding efforts continue.

One of the villages we visited this week was Velyki Prokhody. There we met Nina Viktorivna. Nina fled the village when it was occupied on the first days of the war with her husband. Russian soldiers then moved into her house, along with those of her neighbours. This then led to it being hit by the Ukrainian side. It was totally destroyed. After liberation, Nina and her husband moved back to Velyki Prokhody and, unable to live in their house, moved into the outhouse where previously their dogs had lived. Even this had its windows and roof blown out by the shockwaves of the hit which destroyed the house, as well as damage to the walls which they patched up with plywood sheets. We have replaced all the windows in the building, making it somewhat more bearable as a living space, however it remains freezing cold. With no gas available, we are hoping to buy a wood-powered boiler for Nina and her husband. A good quality model will cost around £1000 with installation and will last them for years. I asked Nina if she had a car and would be able to collect the boiler herself if I ordered it for her to the nearest post office, or if she needed delivery to be arranged. ‘I have a car,’ she replied, ‘it’s the only thing that didn’t burn’.

A few streets away, we met Anya. Her house was one of the newest and biggest in the village, only completed the month before the war started. Next-door to it is her mother’s house, also big and new, where she lived with Anya’s sister. The family had not always been wealthy, but their farm in the village had been successful. Bit by bit, they had accumulated enough money to build the houses of their dreams. When the full-scale invasion began, Anya, her sister, and all of their children managed to escape to Kharkiv. Their mother refused to leave. Under occupation, Russian soldiers moved into both houses and made bases in them, with the mother living in one room and the soldiers in the rest of the house. At some point, the garden was hit, blowing out the windows in both houses. When the territory was liberated and the Russians forced to flee, they set fire to one of the houses. Luckily it was quickly put out, but the inside remains blackened and burned out. Anya’s mother still stayed put until a few months ago when the stress of the occupation, combined with the continued shelling audible in the village, along with the knowledge that the farm she had spent her life developing had been entirely destroyed, and with it not only her income, but that of her children, led to her having a stroke which has left her paralysed. She now lives in Kharkiv with Anya who cares for her. They plan to return to the village in spring, due to a combination of unaffordable rents, homesickness, and the need for a downstairs bedroom. We repaired windows in both houses in December.  

This issue of vandalism by Russian soldiers resurfaces again and again in de-occupied territories. In the same village, we have repaired Maria’s windows. Until the start of the full-scale invasion, Maria and her sister lived on the same plot of land, each with their own. Both sisters left the village with their children at the start of the war. Maria’s sister’s house was completely destroyed by a direct hit, leaving nothing at all. Remarkably, despite being only next door, Maria’s survived unscathed. However, Russian soldiers then moved in. After they were forced to flee back across the border in September 2022, they took with them all of the furniture they could carry, shot through the windows and mirrors and vandalised her family photos. We have replaced all of the windows in Maria’s house.

To think about what a comparatively small area we work in and how much suffering we see, and then to consider how much more there is across occupied, deoccupied, frontline, and former-frontline areas of Ukraine is overwhelming. Despite this, we have to keep doing what we do. As well as providing a practical service by repairing and replacing what has been destroyed and by supporting the local economy, there is also a huge emotional element to it. By giving people windows, doors, boilers, etc., we are giving them hope that a normal life might return. They can sit in their own home, where they have lived all their lives, and feel at least somewhat secure, without the wind which comes from an open space where a window once was, or the lack of light or a view that comes when a window is covered by plywood, reminding them of what has happened to them. Giving people those moments where they can forget about the war and feel normal is worth more than anything else. It may not sound like much, but for people who have lost everything, it is at least something.

So, thank you all for sticking with us thus far. We keep working, having this week started measurements on another 38 houses in two different villages. These will take us to a total of 750 homes repaired, which is an amazing feat. Not only are we so grateful, but so are all the people we work with on the ground here. Your donations are changing lives here every day and it is a privilege to be able to see it happen. Please keep donating and sharing our work.

Donate

We are also so pleased to say that KHARPP’s long-term collaborator and friend Janina Pedan is selling some of her beautiful silk scarves to raise money for our work. The scarves depict the sinking of what was the largest Russian warship, the Moskva, at the start of the war. A large scarf (68cm x 68cm) costs £100, whilst a small (41cm x 41xm) is £50. To order, please contact her on Instagram (@janapedan) or via email (janina.pedan@gmail.com).

To finish, here are some happier photos of our windows being installed and of their recipients:

We are approaching the third year of war in Ukraine, and there is a lot to feel depressed about. As I write this, the whole of Ukraine is reeling from the largest missile attack in the war so far, which has left dead and injured in cities across the country. Western support is fluctuating and fading, and Ukrainian soldiers continue to die in trenches across the east of the country.

All of this is true, but we also wanted to reflect on some of our achievements this year, which would have been really impossible without you.

In 2023, we have done repairs on 540 homes, which brings our total to 667. In December alone we have repaired around sixty homes in Prudianka, Tsupivka, Prokhody, Slatyne, and Rus’ka Lozova. We continue to support five villages with satellite internet systems and eight with generators and portable power stations. We’ve also repaired two further medical clinics. All of this is possible because, over the course of this year, you have donated an amazing £400,000 to our work. This is an unbelievable sum, and we are so grateful that so many of you have put your faith in us to use your money where it’s needed. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are sorry not to be able to send personalised thanks to all of our donors, but please do not think that this means your money is not received or appreciated. Every penny makes a difference and goes some way to transforming the lives of people who have lost so much in this war.

So, this is really just a brief message to pass on our gratitude to you, to wish all of you a very happy new year, and to implore you to stick with us and keep donating, and so we can make 2024 even more productive than 2023 has been.

Donate to KHARPP

Slava Ukraini!

PS. Timur Dzafarov, a talented graphic designer from Kyiv, currently serving in the Ukrainian army, has kindly made us a selection of posters:

If your work/school/university/community would like to put them up and promote us, drop us an email at contact@kharpp.com and we will send you a high-quality PDF.