“There is a Lack of Places for People in Need of Inpatient Care in Ukraine if They Need to Be Evacuated,” – Deputy Executive Director of East SOS
Kateryna Skrypova, Deputy Executive Director at East SOS, spoke with LB.ua about the challenges faced by evacuees in the fourth year of the full-scale war. While evacuations from frontline areas continue to rise, the reception and care system is already overstretched: there are not enough places to accommodate large groups of people, and existing conditions often fall short of providing safe and comfortable living.
At the beginning of 2025, our foundation launched the “Queue of Life” information campaign. It highlights the dynamics of resettlement and tracks the number of evacuation requests that cannot be fulfilled promptly due to the shortage of long-term accommodation places. This number changes daily. Despite these challenges, East SOS continues to rescue people and carry out a full cycle of evacuation support: organizing evacuations from frontline areas through our call center, providing accommodation at transit shelters, assisting with registration and document renewal, helping evacuees find long-term housing.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, East SOS, together with local partners, has established four transit shelters for evacuees in Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Zaporizhzhia. These shelters provide free accommodation, meals, and basic care, serving as temporary safe spaces before people are able to find long-term housing. In Dnipro, evacuees are immediately accommodated at the Center for Social Adaptation for People with Disabilities of the NGO Ocean of Good, which can host up to 150 people. In Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, people are placed in Without Borders shelters, each of which can accommodate more than 35 evacuees. Additional shelters are available for families with children and individuals requiring short-term accommodation.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion, East SOS has created 665 new accommodation places for evacuees with disabilities. Notably, in 2023, the foundation renovated and equipped a former tuberculosis dispensary in Kalush, Ivano-Frankivsk region, transforming it into a residential care facility for people with disabilities. Today, the facility houses 33 people, including 26 internally displaced persons.
In 2023, the Ministry of Social Policy, Family and Unity of Ukraine launched a pilot project to provide older adults and people with disabilities with assisted living and residential care services based on the “money follows the person” principle. To implement this approach, Resolution No. 888 was adopted, defining the funding mechanism and requirements for service providers.
East SOS joined the Ministry’s initiative and is contributing to the restoration of social infrastructure. As part of this effort, the foundation is involved in the reconstruction of two buildings intended for residential care services: one in the village of Stoianiv, Lviv region, and another in the town of Zinkiv, Poltava region. Read more about the situation in the analytical material on LB.ua.
