Sabina Nikitenko and the Mriya community centre in Odesa

Monday 30 March 2026

In the long shadow of war, where cities are measured not only by their skylines but by their endurance, the work of individuals often becomes the quiet architecture of national survival. In Odesa, a city whose humour and cosmopolitan ease have long masked a deep resilience, one finds such architecture in the efforts of Sabina Nikitenko and the Mriya Community Centre — a modest institution whose name, meaning “dream”, carries a weight that has grown heavier with each passing month of conflict.

Odesa has, throughout the full-scale invasion, occupied a peculiar place in Ukraine’s wartime geography. It has not endured the apocalyptic destruction visited upon Mariupol or Bakhmut, yet it has lived under the constant threat of missile and drone attack, its port infrastructure repeatedly targeted, its economic lifeblood intermittently constricted. It is within this atmosphere of suspended normality — neither peace nor total ruin — that civil society has been called upon to fill the innumerable gaps left by a state at war.

The Mriya Community Centre is one such response. Neither wholly a humanitarian hub nor merely a cultural space, it exists at the intersection of necessity and aspiration. Under Sabina Nikitenko’s stewardship, the centre has evolved into a place where the immediate needs of war — psychological support, social cohesion, assistance for the displaced — are addressed alongside the longer-term imperative of preserving a sense of community identity.

This duality is essential to understanding both the centre’s purpose and Nikitenko’s role. War does not only destroy buildings; she fragments the invisible bonds that hold societies together. Families are dispersed, routines disrupted, futures rendered uncertain. In such conditions the provision of material aid, while indispensable, is insufficient. What is required is a reconstruction of trust, of continuity, of belonging. The Mriya Community Centre attempts precisely this, offering a space in which individuals may begin, tentatively, to reassemble their lives.

Nikitenko herself represents a particular archetype that has emerged across Ukraine since 2022 — the civilian organiser who becomes, through circumstance rather than design, a pillar of local resilience. There is no grand institutional machinery behind its work, no vast bureaucratic apparatus. Instead there is a network of volunteers, a patchwork of donors, and an unrelenting demand from the community it serves. Its leadership is therefore not expressed through hierarchy, but through presence — the daily, often invisible labour of coordination, reassurance and persistence.

Within the centre this labour manifests in a variety of forms. There are programmes for internally displaced persons, many of whom have arrived in Odesa from the south and east with little more than what they could carry. There are activities for children whose education has been disrupted and whose sense of safety has been profoundly shaken. There are workshops, discussions and cultural events that seek to preserve the texture of ordinary life in extraordinary times.

Yet it would be a mistake to characterise such work as merely palliative. There is, in the very act of gathering, an implicit defiance. The continuation of community life under conditions of war is not simply an attempt to endure; it is a refusal to concede the social space to violence. In this sense, the Mriya Community Centre participates in the broader Ukrainian war effort, not through arms, but through the maintenance of the civic fabric upon which any post-war recovery must depend.

Odesa itself, with its layered history of empires and identities, provides a fitting backdrop to this endeavour. It has long been a city of intermediaries — between land and sea, between cultures, between past and future. The work undertaken by Sabina Nikitenko and her colleagues reflects this intermediary character. They stand between disruption and continuity, translating the chaos of war into forms of support that can be understood, accepted and, ultimately, built upon.

The challenges they face are neither abstract nor diminishing. Funding remains uncertain, as international attention shifts and donor fatigue becomes an ever-present risk. The psychological toll upon both beneficiaries and volunteers accumulates over time, often in ways that are not immediately visible. Moreover the very success of such centres can generate additional demand, stretching already limited resources.

And yet it is precisely within these constraints that the significance of the Mriya Community Centre becomes most apparent. Large institutions and state structures, for all their importance, cannot replicate the intimacy of local engagement. They cannot, by their nature, respond with the same immediacy or sensitivity to the particularities of individual experience. It is here that figures such as Sabina Nikitenko assume a role that is at once deeply local and profoundly national.

For Ukraine the war has necessitated not only a mobilisation of her armed forces, but a mobilisation of her society in its entirety. Victory, in its fullest sense, will not be measured solely in territorial integrity, but in the preservation of a functioning, cohesive civic life. The work carried out in places like the Mriya Community Centre is therefore not ancillary to the war effort; it is constitutive of it.

There is a tendency, particularly amongst external observers, to focus upon the visible markers of conflict — the movement of front lines, the deployment of weapons systems, the calculations of geopolitical strategy. These are, of course, of immense importance. But they do not, in themselves, capture the totality of what is at stake. Beneath these visible dynamics lies a quieter struggle, waged in community centres, schools and homes, to sustain the social bonds that make a nation more than a collection of territory.

In Odesa Sabina Nikitenko’s work at the Mriya Community Centre offers a glimpse into this quieter struggle. It is a reminder that resilience is not an abstract quality, but a practice — one that must be enacted daily, often without recognition, and always in the face of uncertainty. The dream implied by the centre’s name is therefore not a distant or unattainable vision. It is rather a series of small, concrete acts through which the future is, piece by fragile piece, assembled.

As the war continues, and as its outcome remains contested, such acts acquire an increasing significance. They are the threads from which the post-war fabric will be woven. Without them, even the most decisive military victory would risk being hollow. With them, there remains the possibility not only of survival, but of renewal.

The story of Sabina Nikitenko and the Mriya Community Centre is not merely a local narrative. It is a microcosm of Ukraine’s broader experience — a testament to the capacity of individuals and communities to create meaning, solidarity and hope amidst the most testing of circumstances.