Last winter as Olena Morozova braced for a long and arduous trip to Ukrainian-controlled territory from her Russian-occupied home in Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast, her friends were traveling in the opposite direction.
The friends — a family with two sons — came back to their house in Lysychansk because they couldn’t afford to pay the rent in Dnipro, the regional capital in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which hosts the largest number of internally displaced people in Ukraine, Morozova told the Kyiv Independent.
“They told me it was very difficult (to live) in Ukrainian-controlled territory, too,” Morozova said, “But I didn’t even want to listen, because we were set to leave (Lysychansk) after the New Year.”
After nearly three years of all-out war, some internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine are opting to return to Russian-occupied areas due to the Ukrainian government’s failure to provide them with proper housing and enough financial aid to adequately resettle.
An estimated one-third of the Ukrainian population, or nearly 14 million people, left their homes in 2022 following the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Many have returned since, but at least 3.5 million remain internally displaced at the moment, according to the UN.
Official data on how many people have returned to Russian occupation is difficult to obtain. The Social Policy Ministry recorded 1,262 displaced persons returning to occupied territories over the last nine months, the Ombudsman Office told the Kyiv Independent but noted the number could be higher, citing limited access to the data.
Some estimate the number is much higher. Luhansk-born Ukrainian lawmaker Maksym Tkachenko from the ruling Servant of the People party recently said that 150,000 people had left Ukrainian-controlled territories to return to Russian occupation.
After his comment was widely published in the media and a top Ukrainian official accused him of lying “for the hype,” Tkachenko retracted his statement, adding that it was his “unfounded and emotional assumption.” Nonetheless, other officials commented on the failed state policy for the displaced, without citing their numbers.
At the outset of the war, Ukraine’s government responded to the influx of displaced persons by announcing financial assistance, compensation for employers who gave work to IDPs, and partial or full subsidies on the cost of living, according to the Ombudsman’s Office. It has also ordered local administrations to provide them with free housing, which has proved difficult to get and often inadequate to people’s needs.
Stories of some families show that a lack of enough government assistance may be forcing some to make the decision to return home, even if it means life under Russian occupation, where basic services are lacking and people live under the threat of prosecution for their Ukrainian identity.
“Now (my friends) are crying and want to return (to Ukraine),” said Morozova, 48, whose family is happy with their choice to move to Kyiv despite their struggle to make ends meet without any state support.
Living on the brink of poverty
Many IDPs live on the brink of poverty, with 40% relying on humanitarian assistance from the state and international humanitarian organizations to meet their basic needs, according to a UN November 2024 survey.
Their struggles only got worse in March 2024 after the government revised its regulations on financial aid towards living expenses for the internally displaced — set around $45 per month for adults and $70 for children and people with disabilities.
The allowance is far less than the actual subsistence minimum, last estimated by the Social Policy Ministry in 2022 at around $145 and projected to be much higher now.
Per the new decree, the number of people receiving the payments dropped more than twice – from 2.5 million in 2023 to over 1 million in August 2024, according to the Social Policy Ministry. The payments will be revised every six months, cutting off more people as the government aims to primarily help those with the lowest income.
But for many displaced people, this aid is “not just partial assistance in paying for housing, but in fact one of the few means of subsistence,” the Ombudsman’s Office told the Kyiv Independent.
“We rented whatever was available,” said Antonina Palamarchuk, 64, who fled Myrnohrad, Donetsk Oblast, and moved around Ukraine until settling in Kyiv with her daughter.
The cost of their apartment — Hr 12,000 or $280 — exceeds Antonina’s pension, which is just $2 more than the legislated minimum that would have allowed her to receive financial aid from the state.
She told the Kyiv Independent that a relative decided to go live with family in Donetsk, occupied by Russia since 2014, because she had nowhere to live in Ukraine-controlled territory.
State lodgings stand empty as people struggle to find housing
Even as the government has claimed to provide free housing for the displaced, many wait months to be housed. Activists say that the reason behind the long wait times is not the lack of available lodgings, but their inadequate management at the local and national level.
“There is certainly little help from the state in the form of housing,” said lawmaker Tkachenko, who also co-founded a nonprofit “VPO Ukrainy” that helps displaced people.
As of July 1, only 2,995 internally displaced people in the country were living in the temporary municipal lodgings, and 13,048 were on the waiting list, the Infrastructure Development Ministry told the Kyiv Independent.
As of July 1, only 2,995 internally displaced people in the country were living in the temporary municipal lodgings, and 13,048 were on the waiting list.
Tkachenko said that conditions in government-provided housing are often inadequate — such as “one shower used by 50 women and children” — while people are often forced to pay for utility services themselves.
Though the state offers to cover these expenses for the local administrations, it’s “easier for some managers of these facilities to collect money directly from displaced people” rather than wait to be reimbursed by the state, a process that can be long and bureaucratic, Tkachenko told the Kyiv Independent.
His account corresponds with a recent UN survey from October 2024, which said that 23% of IDPs reported lacking adequate accommodation, compared to only 6% of the non-displaced.
“We're talking about the minimum necessities of life,” Tkachenko said.
A 2022 decree mandated that local governments finance and build shelters or provide municipal buildings for the displaced.
While local communities helped lots of internally displaced people in 2022, they have since run into trouble finding the resources to accommodate everyone as the war stretches into its third year, said Petro Andriushchenko, ex-advisor to the mayor of Russian-occupied Mariupol.
Meanwhile, habitable state-owned facilities sit empty. According to Andriushchenko, the Education Ministry never placed any IDPs in university dorms, even though they have remained vacant as students study remotely due to the war.
“(Local) communities ask a logical question: Why should we give away our building (to the displaced) if there is an empty state building?” he said.
He added that international organizations are ready to finance reconstructions of the living quarters for the displaced, so the government’s passive approach had little to do with the lack of funds.
“People on the top just don’t want to make uncomfortable managerial decisions,” he said. “It’s about their inability to put things in order in state-owned real estate that is empty or repurpose it.”
Another reason for what Andriushchenko described as the government’s “non-existent policy” towards the displaced citizens could be Ukraine’s strong civil society. Since the onset of the full-scale war, countless volunteers, individuals, and organizations have mobilized to help their fellow citizens.
“Volunteers picked us up (after we crossed the border),” Morozova said, describing her family’s trip from Russia's border to the nearest city Sumy in the north of Ukraine last winter.
Volunteers also helped them find the first place to stay in a village near Kyiv, and later — a single-room apartment that Morozova now rents with her husband and son.
“The flat is really broken, but at least the roof doesn’t leak and there are no drafts,” she said. “We lived in the cold for two years (in occupation).”
The hard choice to return home
Amid higher unemployment, diminishing government support, and harsh living conditions as Russia bombards Ukrainian energy infrastructure, some people turn to their last resort: going back home to Russian occupation.
The trip back itself can be treacherous. There are no border crossings between Ukrainian-controlled and Russia-held territories in Ukraine and the only remaining border crossing at the two countries’ borders is for entrance back into Ukraine only, said Deputy Presidential Office head Iryna Vereshchuk during a TV interview on Nov. 27.
Vereshchuk blamed the lack of border crossings as the reason why the government is unable to keep official statistics on the number of displaced persons returning to occupation.
The only option for Ukrainians to get into Russia is by plane from other countries to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where Russia has set up a “filtration” facility where they are screened by special services on arrival.
This route is long and expensive, with ticket costs starting around $1,000, according to Vereshchuk. “Filtration” can reportedly last for days, as members of the Russian Security Service question people’s allegiance and check their phones.
Russian authorities said in October that 83,000 Ukrainians entered the country through Sheremetyevo over the past year, while another 24,000 were turned away.
Based on Andriushchenko’s communications with people who tried going through the airport and the data he claims to get from sources in occupied Mariupol, he and other activists estimate the number of Ukrainians turned away on arrival to be much higher — roughly 200,000 or more. The number of those who went in could be as high as 150,000.
“They just go wherever they have a place to live,” Andriushchenko said. “Because here they simply have nothing to spend or nothing to pay for food.”
Others return home to look after ailing relatives. According to Olha, a 67-year-old Zaporizhzhia native currently living in Kyiv whose name has been changed for security reasons, one of her friends returned to occupation in September to look after her bed-ridden husband, despite being detained and held captive by Russians early into the full-scale invasion.
Olha hasn't heard from her friend since.
Life under occupation
While Russian propaganda uses the numbers of returning Ukrainians to claim that life under occupation is better than in Ukrainian-controlled territories, international media reports and stories told by Ukrainians in Russian-controlled areas paint a different picture.
In Lysychansk, Morozova told the Kyiv Independent she didn’t see fresh bread for half a year after its occupation in July 2022. She survived by selling fire-cooked dumplings, while her husband made little money by delivering drinking water to the elderly neighbors who had some retirement savings.
After weathering two years without utilities except for gas, Morozova fell severely sick and couldn’t get out of bed. There was no medical assistance available in the city. The Russian soldiers which her family asked for help said that they ”have nothing to do with civilians.”
A neighbor took her to the hospital in Luhansk, occupied since 2014, where she received some medical help.
“They injected me with Ukrainian drugs. Expired, though,” Morozova added.
When she spoke in October with her friends who returned to occupied Lysychansk last winter, they told her that little had changed: There was no water supply or central heating and electricity was unstable.
“Children are having 20-minute-long lessons — almost no studies at all,” Morozova said. “And mice are pestering them. There are a lot of mice in apartments because there are a lot of empty apartments — many people have moved out.”
Their story reflects some of the dire conditions Ukrainians face under Russia’s rule. In addition to prosecution, detention, and murders of pro-Ukrainian activists, they also include enforced Russification. Basic services like schools for children are available only for those with Russian passports.
People without Russian IDs can’t prove their property rights under a 2023 decree. Starting from July 1, 2024, they can be evicted from their own homes as “aliens.”
According to Andriushchenko, the decree incited a wave of returnees to occupied territories in the past months, as people came home just to make sure their property wasn't taken away, going back to Ukraine again afterward.
But activists say that displaced Ukrainians can’t even receive state compensation for damaged property if their homes are in occupation, as financial aid is only given to homeowners in Ukraine-controlled areas.
“The government treats the displaced like invisible people,” said Andriushchenko, who left his post as a mayor’s adviser recently.
Note from the author:
Hello, this is Natalia Yermak, thank you for reading this article. Amid geopolitical discussions on possible negotiations, where pieces of land are seen as bargaining chips, it's easy to forget that they are also someone's home that means the world to those people. If you want to read more human stories like this one, please consider supporting our work by becoming a member.
Dinara Khalilova
