* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Elena Kozhemyakina will never forget the sounds of the rockets that screamed in from the east and slammed into her house last January. Her family only survived because the Grad rocket failed to explode.
In January, more than a dozen of these rockets hit the eastern district of Mariupol, a port city that lies on the coast of the Sea of Azov, Ukraine. The frontline is only seven kilometres away from its 400 000 inhabitants and the town hosts some 20 000 displaced people from the Donbas region.
Ukraine has one the world’s fastest growing populations of forcibly displaced persons – nearly 2 million people in just 12 months. But unlike other humanitarian crises of this proportion, there are no large refugee camps, or columns of displaced walking the streets.
The humanitarian toll of this conflict may be nearly invisible but it is real. In Mariupol, I recently met some of the victims of the conflict: Lena Ugrenkova and her ten-year-old son Alek, and Natalia Logozynska and her five-year-old twins Fedor and Timofei.
Lena Ugrenkova and her son Alek fled the city of Donetsk and came to the coastal town of Mariupol in September last year, finding shelter with her parents. One member of the family they did not want to leave behind was their dog Greta. “Greta saved us one day when she jumped on us just as shells landed nearby our home”, Alek recounts. He has had epileptic fits, a condition his mother blames on the shock of the shelling they experienced. Jobless, Lena is grateful for the assistance she received from the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), which used EU funding to provide cash grants of approximately €250 to some 800 displaced families in the Mariupol area. “We were able to pay for different items such as medicines and utility bills, as I had very little savings,” Lena explains “It really helped us get through the winter”.
Read the full blog post on ECHO's website.
