After the Evacuation: Donetsk’s Displaced Face Another Battle in Kharkiv
By Matthew Parish
Saturday 3 October 2026
There is a natural tendency to imagine an evacuation as having an ending. A person is taken from a village under bombardment, from a town increasingly within range of Russian artillery or drones, or from an apartment in Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, Druzhkivka or one of the other communities of Donetsk region from which civilian life is steadily being squeezed. They are placed in a vehicle and driven westwards. Eventually they cross into Kharkiv region. The immediate danger has receded and we imagine that the evacuation has been completed. In reality, for many of these people the journey out of danger is merely the beginning of another ordeal.
The numbers themselves ought to command attention. In September 2026 the Donetsk Regional State Administration reported that a transit centre in Kharkiv region was receiving approximately 300 people from Donetsk region every day. Over almost a year it had assisted some 60,000 people, including 7,700 children and approximately 3,000 people with limited mobility. These are not abstract statistics. They represent elderly people who may have abandoned homes in which they spent their entire adult lives, families arriving with whatever they could carry, people suffering from chronic illnesses and disabilities, and people whose physical and psychological reserves have already been exhausted by months or years of living close to a battlefield.
Official descriptions of the evacuation system understandably emphasise what is being provided. Transit centres offer humanitarian assistance, hot meals, medical and psychological support, help with documents, temporary accommodation and assistance with onward transportation. The Kharkiv authorities reported in September that evacuees arriving at the Lozova transit centre were being provided with legal, psychological, financial and humanitarian assistance. None of this should be discounted. An enormous amount of work is being undertaken by officials, volunteers, charities, medical personnel and ordinary Ukrainians, frequently under circumstances of extraordinary pressure.
Yet there is a difference between having a system of assistance and having enough resources to meet the human needs confronting that system. The relentless evacuation from Donetsk region places continual pressure not merely upon transit centres but upon the places in which evacuees subsequently find themselves. A person who has escaped shelling does not cease to require assistance when the evacuation vehicle stops. On the contrary, this is often the moment at which the full dimensions of his or her needs become apparent.
Consider something as elementary as a mattress. To somebody living an ordinary European life, a mattress scarcely registers as an object of humanitarian importance. To an elderly woman who has left her home carrying two bags, or to a disabled man who has spent hours being transported away from the front, it can make the difference between a tolerable night and another episode of misery. The Ukrainian Red Cross has itself identified mattresses, bedding, blankets, pillows, hygiene supplies and basic household items as necessities for people arriving after evacuation. These are not luxuries added after the important humanitarian work has been completed. They are the foundations of elementary human dignity.
The problem becomes still more acute for people with disabilities or restricted mobility. Evacuation systems designed around the able-bodied can fail badly when confronted with somebody who cannot climb stairs, use a conventional bathroom, sleep safely on an unsuitable bed or prepare food without assistance. Donetsk authorities reported that thousands of people with limited mobility have passed through the Kharkiv-region system. Humanitarian organisations report that finding appropriate accommodation for families containing people with reduced mobility remains one of the recurring requests they receive.
The case of one man evacuated from Kramatorsk illustrates the problem starkly. According to an account published by the Donetsk authorities in July, Oleksandr had suffered two strokes and could not move independently. He passed through Lozova before being transported onwards to Dnipro, where accommodation was found in a social adaptation centre for people with disabilities. His case ended with an appropriate placement because humanitarian workers intervened. But it also reveals how complicated evacuation becomes when the person being evacuated cannot simply be given a bed and told where the kitchen is.
Disability therefore requires more than wheelchair access. It may require specialist mattresses, assistance with washing and toileting, continence supplies, medication, nursing attention, accessible showers, suitable transport and people with the time and training to provide care. Ukraine has established long-term nursing-care mechanisms for evacuated internally displaced people who are elderly or disabled and medically assessed as needing continuing care. That is an important recognition of the problem. Nevertheless, every person falling between the different parts of the system risks becoming somebody else’s responsibility.
Food presents another deceptively complicated problem. Providing a hot meal upon arrival is essential, but displaced people do not need to eat only once. They need sustainable arrangements for preparing food wherever they are subsequently housed. A room containing beds is not necessarily a viable home. If dozens of people share inadequate cooking facilities, if there are insufficient refrigerators, kettles, pots, pans, plates or places to store food, then nominal accommodation can become degrading remarkably quickly.
This is particularly important for elderly people, children and people with medical conditions requiring particular diets. Food parcels themselves solve only part of the problem if the recipient lacks somewhere to cook their contents. Humanitarian planning therefore needs to think beyond calories and towards kitchens: functioning cookers, refrigerators, preparation surfaces, sinks, utensils and safe places in which people can make tea, soup or a simple evening meal. These mundane objects rarely feature in dramatic photographs of wartime evacuation, but they determine whether displaced people can recover a small degree of independence.
Clothing presents the same problem. Many evacuees do not leave Donetsk region after weeks of careful preparation and packing. Evacuation may be postponed until the danger becomes intolerable, particularly by older people reluctant to abandon homes, animals and possessions accumulated over decades. People can therefore arrive with remarkably little. Kharkiv’s own social assistance system acknowledges the continuing demand: municipal aid points providing clothing and footwear to vulnerable residents, including internally displaced people and persons with disabilities, reported in July that they continually needed replenishment of clothing, shoes, bedding, blankets, pillows, towels and other household necessities.
And now winter approaches.
This changes the calculation profoundly. Kharkiv winters are not an inconvenience that can be met with an additional jumper. Temperatures fall below freezing, snow and ice are normal and Russia has repeatedly made Ukrainian energy infrastructure part of its war. A displaced person inadequately housed in October may become a person in physical danger in December. A shortage of bedding becomes more serious when nights are bitterly cold; inadequate clothing becomes dangerous when somebody must queue outdoors or travel between institutions; insufficient cooking facilities become still more consequential when hot food and drinks are among the simplest means by which people keep warm.
Winter assistance therefore has to be assembled before winter arrives. Warm coats, boots, thermal clothing, hats, gloves and socks need to be collected and distributed. Mattresses, blankets, pillows, sheets and duvets need to be acquired in quantity. Temporary accommodation requires functioning heating and contingency arrangements for interruptions to electricity and district heating. Kitchens need enough equipment to allow their occupants actually to use them. Stocks of ordinary food need to be supplemented by food suitable for children, elderly people and those with medical or dietary requirements.
Above all, there needs to be a recognition that the evacuation crisis is changing character. The heroic image of evacuation is the vehicle leaving the dangerous place: volunteers driving towards shelling while civilians are driven away from it. That work deserves every admiration. But humanitarian responsibility cannot finish at the door of the minibus. The evacuation chain extends from the threatened apartment or village house all the way to somewhere in which the evacuated person can live with a reasonable degree of warmth, nutrition, cleanliness, security and dignity.
This matters particularly because the people now leaving parts of Donetsk region may disproportionately include those least equipped to start their lives again. People with money, relatives elsewhere, private cars and professional mobility often have more options for leaving earlier. Those who remain until conditions become intolerable may include elderly people, isolated people, people with disabilities and those whose poverty leaves them with nowhere obvious to go. The later stages of a prolonged evacuation can therefore impose progressively greater demands upon the humanitarian system even where the absolute numbers fluctuate.
Kharkiv itself is hardly a city overflowing with spare resources. It remains a city at war, periodically attacked and carrying its own enormous population of displaced and vulnerable people. Asking Kharkiv and its surrounding region to absorb continuing waves of evacuees from Donetsk without corresponding increases in humanitarian resources merely transfers scarcity from one group of war-affected Ukrainians to another. The remarkable generosity of volunteers cannot indefinitely substitute for warehouses full of food, accessible accommodation, mattresses, winter clothing, functioning kitchens and professional carers.
There is consequently an urgent role here for international humanitarian organisations, foreign donors, Ukrainian charities, businesses and private individuals. Assistance need not always take the glamorous form of ambulances or armoured evacuation vehicles. A pallet of mattresses may be less photogenic but no less important. Industrial cooking equipment, washing machines, refrigerators, blankets, disability equipment, winter boots and warm coats can transform the conditions in which displaced people spend their first bewildering weeks away from home. Funding carers and nurses may achieve more for a severely disabled evacuee than another box of generic humanitarian supplies.
There is also a moral point that should not be obscured by the bureaucratic language of internally displaced persons, transit centres and humanitarian caseloads. These people are not a logistical problem. They are Ukrainians whose ordinary lives have been destroyed by war. Many have remained in Donetsk region because it was their home and because abandoning one’s home, perhaps forever, is one of the hardest decisions a human being can make. When eventually they arrive exhausted in Kharkiv or elsewhere, carrying a plastic bag, a suitcase, a frightened animal or simply whatever possessions they could gather, they deserve something better than survival at the lowest possible standard.
Ukraine’s evacuation network is saving lives every day, and the people operating it deserve recognition rather than criticism. But saving a life creates the next responsibility: helping that person live. As the cold months approach, that responsibility becomes urgent. Kharkiv needs more food, more mattresses and bedding, more winter clothing, better food preparation facilities and substantially greater resources for elderly and disabled evacuees. These things should be arriving now, not after the first severe frost exposes their absence.
War strips people of possessions with astonishing speed. A home, a kitchen, a wardrobe, a familiar bed and the accumulated conveniences of an ordinary lifetime can disappear in an afternoon. Humanitarian assistance cannot restore what has been lost, nor can it cure the grief of leaving Donetsk behind. But it can provide warmth, food, a clean bed and somebody capable of helping a person who cannot help themselves. In the bleak circumstances of evacuation, those apparently modest things amount to something immensely important: the restoration of a measure of human dignity.
