Ukraine. Displaced: Post-Trauma (Pt. 1)

The series Displaced is a project about the lives of internally displaced persons in Ukraine from the Donbas region and Crimea. It looks at the current living conditions of people that were forced to leave their homes and how they are coping with their new lives. According to UN figures, there are over 1 million registered IDPs in Ukraine.

For several months a team of Hromadske traveled around Ukraine, from Sloviansk to Lviv, in search of stories of those who were left without their homes because of the war and the annexation.

The first episode focuses on the psychological problems internally displaced persons suffer, what kind of help they need and what could happen if they are unable to receive proper and prompt treatment.

There are 4 stories in the first episode:

– How people who evacuated because of artillery shelling are starting their new lives in the Sloviansk;
– How volunteers from Kharkiv Station meet displaced persons at the local train station;
– The story of a young boy from Avdiivka, which is near Donetsk airport, who is finding it difficult to recover from what he has witnessed during the war;
– How the absence of basic things influences the way displaced people settle in to a new home. The story is based on the example of Maryna who lives in one room with 5 other members of her family.

The next episode tells the stories of a young displaced couple who found a safe haven near Odesa and have now had a child; how a large family from the Luhansk region is trying to start a new life outside of Kharkiv; disabled IDPs living in a summer camp without any help from the state; and how three Crimean Tatar families are planning to start a business in the Carpathian village of Borynia, western Ukraine.

// Hromadske with the support of the Thomson Foundation. Filmed in February, 2015.