Western Ukraine’s Banderstadt shelters eastern Ukraine’s refugees

Under
notices extolling Ukrainian statehood and self-determination are huge piles of
clothing, foodstuffs and children’s toys donated by locals. Volunteers offer
cups of tea to nervous, tired people, many straight off the train or bus from
destroyed towns and cities. Osvita has lent its building to house an aid centre
for the swelling number of Ukrainians fleeing first Russian annexation of
Crimea, and now the conflict in east Ukraine that has claimed well more than 1,000 civilian lives.

“Real war
was outside my city, but now it’s come into the city,” said Tanya, 28, who had
just arrived in Ivano-Frankivsk, located in Ukraine’s far west, from besieged
Luhansk in the east. She did not want to be identified, fearing retribution against relatives still in Luhansk. “All I can do now is pray.” 

Between March and August, at least 117,000 Ukrainians have been forced to flee their
homes for other areas of the country, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Of
those, 102,600 are from the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, where
self-declared ‘people’s republics’ are fighting the Ukrainian army for more
independence from a “fascist” Kyiv or for union with Russia (it’s not clear
which).

Meanwhile, Russia says that 730,000 Ukrainians have fled to Russia since the start of the
conflict.

The real
number of internally-displaced people (IDPs, as opposed to refugees who are
defined in international law as having crossed a national border) could be as
much as three times higher, says Oldrich Andrysek, UNHCR Regional Representative
in Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. The figure is based on government registration
but many who have fled do not bother to register, believing it to be useless or
even harmful if the list falls into the wrong hands. With no relevant law or
even official definition of an IDP, no budget, and no integrated system of
assistance, the Ukrainian government response to the crisis is woefully
inadequate. 

Ukrainian
civil society has stepped in to fill the gap. Andrysek says volunteer
organisations are providing up to 90 percent of Ukraine’s IDP relief effort.

In
Ivano-Frankivsk, non-government youth organisation Etalon is setting an
innovative example of cross-sectoral cooperation. People like Tanya from
Luhansk can get help right away from representatives of health, education,
migration, employment and social services gathered in one room of the Osvita
building. Psychologists and lawyers are there to provide counselling. Notices
on the walls offer free tours of the town, or trips to the nearby Carpathian mountains.
When Tanya arrives, she is at once offered a food package and up to two week’s
free stay in the Banderstadt hotel.

The name Banderstadt comes from controversial Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan
Bandera, who lived from 1909-1959, when a KGB agent murdered him in Munich, Germany.

Bandera’s followers are called “Banderites,” a term used by Russian
media to demonize western Ukrainians as extreme nationalists and fascists bent on
wiping out the Russian people and language in the south and east of the country. It
is one more of the Ukraine conflict’s many ironies that Ivano-Frankivsk’s
Banderstadt now provides shelter for dozens of families fleeing violence
inspired by the alleged ‘Banderite’ threat.

“We kept
quiet when they called us Banderites,” says Etalon director Lesya Aronets.
“When they scared everyone in Crimea with us Banderites who would come and chop
them up and eat them we kept quiet, we just started to act. We prepared an
appeal to all our Carpathian citizens and state organs to extend a helping hand
to those Ukrainians who need support.”             

Despite the
impressive nationwide volunteer effort, many patriotic Ukrainians are finding
it difficult to respond to the newcomers who have inundated their towns seeking
accommodation and support. Everyone has a story about ungrateful refugees from
the east who expect to be provided with everything and make no attempt to help
themselves, or continue to support the anti-Ukrainian movement that is battling
Ukrainian armed forces and creating the very disaster they had to flee.

“Some
people left and came here out of terror and some came out of self interest;
there are all kinds,” says Aronets. “Some say they want to come for a week’s
holiday – we don’t provide free holidays.”

 Tanya from
Luhansk, a 28-year-old sales manager who did not want to give her last name,
seemed overwhelmed by the help she received. “People here are really kind, you
can see that straight away,” she said. She first visited Ivano-Frankivsk a few
weeks ago, on holiday from what was then becoming a difficult situation in
Luhansk. Since then, the electricity has been cut off and shooting has started
in the streets, causing her to flee west once again.

 Many other
IDPs in Ivano-Frankivsk are amazed and grateful at their reception. But there
is a definite frostiness too between some locals who feel they are being taken
advantage of, and some displaced people who find the level of help insulting.

 The problem
is particularly acute when IDPs are able-bodied men of working – and fighting –
age. Some inhabitants of Ivano-Frankivsk and neighbouring Lviv have called for
men from the east to be banned from entering their regions, or excluded from
aid.

“We’d have
liked to exclude them,” says Aronets frankly. “Many soldiers from our region
are dying in the east; in one black week sixteen young men came back in coffins.
There was a wave of social disgust after that.”

Mariana
Ozorovych, also from Etalon, says the organisation cannot turn men away because
it would violate European ideals of gender equality. “We accept everyone.”

“But how do
we explain this to a mother whose son died there, and she sees a young man
coming and sitting here while our men are fighting for his territory?” asks
Aronets. “I understand that there are moral principles, and there are legal
rights. It’s difficult.”

In fact, internally displaced people. have no special legal rights in Ukrainian legislation. And people like
Tanya have difficulty defining for themselves who they are.

“I took an
emotional decision to come here for two weeks. If after that I can’t go back, I
suppose that makes me a refugee,” she says doubtfully. “I don’t really know
what that would mean for me though.”

 Since this
interview, Luhansk, surrounded by the Ukrainian army and with no water or
electricity, has become a disaster zone. It seems unlikely that Tanya will be
going home soon.

Irina
Rudneva, who collected a few documents, clothes and the family cat and fled
from Kramatorsk in Donetsk oblast in June, is more definite.

“My
relatives can’t help me, so I came here to see if we can get status as
refugees,” she said in the coordinating committee centre. “At the moment the
government considers we are re-settlers, and that there is no war in the
country: no dead, no refugees. I think I’m a refugee if I had to leave my home
and everything I ever earned in my life. I left it all behind and I don’t know
if it will be in one piece when I return.”

Rudneva
sees little point in registering as a displaced person. Her relatives in
Ivano-Frankivsk region found her an empty house to live in rent-free, and her
husband has got a low-paid job via the employment centre. As Rudneva
scrupulously lists every item in the humanitarian aid package she received via
Etalon – basic food and hygiene items, an iron, a quilt, a blanket and
second-hand sheets – it is clear she considers the package insufficient. She came
unwillingly to the centre to try and get help enrolling her son at the local
college.           

Once these disclosed people move on from the Banderstadt or from a hostel outside the town, Etalon has a
list of available accommodation, much of it offered rent-free in empty houses
in villages. Regional authorities provide a one-off 500 hryvnia payment per
person to help with rent or utilities. Etalon is also unique in having
developed a legal agreement between the coordinating centre and IDPs, which
acts as a guarantee for temporary accommodation, and a voucher to enable people
to register for pensions, healthcare, education and benefits.         

Etalon
gained its invaluable experience in rapid assistance provision and coordination
from a partner NGO in Hungary which helped alleviate the aftermath of
disastrous Carpathian floods in 2008. Etalon staff completed a work experience
project in Hungary in January this year. In February they decided to set up a
coordinating council in case of some future disaster, like another flood. “The
idea was to demonstrate the effectiveness of cooperation between the emergency
ministry and civic organisations in difficult situations,” says Aronets.
“Neither they nor us could have guessed quite how complicated the situation in
Ukraine was going to be.”

The organisation
received its first calls for help on March 2, from army families in Crimea and
Ukrainian activists in Kharkiv. Since then, 2500 people from Crimea and east
Ukraine have appealed for assistance, and 1500 are registered to receive more
long-term aid.

As the
Ukrainian army takes towns in East Ukraine back under government control, some
IDPs have already returned home. Andrysek from UNHCR suggests the government
should encourage more to return by offering a one-off start-up payment,
otherwise economic and social problems of displacement can drag on for months
and years. Ivano-Frankivsk already has high levels of unemployment which an
influx of newcomers can only exacerbate, and its close-knit society based on
Ukrainian and European culture and the Greek Catholic church is very foreign to
east Ukrainians.

But some
IDPs, like Rudneva from Kramatorsk, would like to stay permanently. 

“Why not –
do you think all people where I’m from are great? There’s crap everywhere,” she
says. “Yes, most people (in the east) are for Russia, but many of them are
actually originally from west Ukraine, their forebears were sent to rebuild
Donbas after the war. So even though everyone talks about Banderites and
fascists there, in fact their ancestors are from here. But it’s dangerous to
openly mention that fact.” 

Tanya, as
she heads for her room in the Banderstadt, adds “Ivano-Frankivsk is a European
city, so of course they want to be in Europe. People in the elast are more
Soviet and can’t believe that Russia can be acting the way it is. But mostly
people just want peace now. They’ve been playing at war for long enough.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been produced with support from www.mymedia.org.ua, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action, as well as Ukraine Media Project, managed by Internews and funded by the United States Agency for International Development.