Ukraine Continues to Face a Critical Shortage of Long-Term Accommodation for Evacuated Elderly and Persons with Disabilities
Every day, the East SOS evacuation crews, together with our partners, travel to frontline areas to help civilians escape danger. We provide a full evacuation cycle – from receiving an evacuation request to arranging assistance at transit centers. This includes helping people obtain or restore documents, providing psychosocial support, finding long-term accommodation for older people and persons with disabilities who are living alone, and arranging for transportation for those reuniting with relatives.
The greatest challenge remains finding suitable accommodation for people with reduced mobility, as residential care facilities and supported living homes are critically overstretched. This has created what is often referred to as a “queue of life”: evacuees have to remain in temporary shelters until permanent placements become available. As a result, evacuations from the areas under relentless attack of the enemy are slowed, since new evacuations can only take place as accommodation spaces become available.
Finding available spaces in safer regions of Ukraine and abroad is a demanding task carried out by East SOS’s logistics managers. Working closely with partner civil society organizations, the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, regional social protection departments, and host hromadas, the team identifies appropriate accommodation.
In June 2026, our Foundation secured accommodation within Ukraine for 47 people requiring residential care. Another 22 people were accommodated abroad in cooperation with our partners.
People evacuated from frontline areas who had been temporarily staying at the Social Adaptation Center for People with Disabilities by NGO “Ocean of Kindness” in Dnipro were subsequently accommodated in Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, and Poltava oblasts.
Of those assisted:
34 were admitted to hospitals providing long-term nursing care;
5 were accommodated in residential care facilities;
4 received temporary shelter services;
2 were accommodated in collective sites;
2 were admitted to the rehabilitation center;
22 were accommodated abroad in cooperation with our partners.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion, we have helped arrange accommodation for more than 4,500 evacuees in state residential care facilities.
East SOS organizes social transportation and accompaniment to host hromadas, supports people as they settle into their new locations, monitors the needs of care institutions, and renovates and equips residential care facilities to improve living conditions.
We emphasize the urgent need to establish and expand across Ukraine:
– collective sites designed in line with accessibility requirements;
– transit centers capable of providing residential care and support services;
– residential care and supported living facilities.
We also stress the importance of capacity building for social workers responsible for identifying suitable long-term accommodation for evacuees.
Every successful placement creates an opportunity to rescue someone else still waiting to be evacuated from danger. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we have evacuated more than 97,000 people from frontline settlements, including over 16,000 people with reduced mobility.
