Today and Tomorrow in Eastern Ukraine: Life and Hopes along the Line of Contact
Published: Apr 26, 2018 Reading time: 1 minute
Did you know that armed conflict still rages on the doorstep of the European Union? It does, in eastern Ukraine and it just entered its fifth year. Just 2,000 kilometres from Berlin, 4.4 million people live in dire humanitarian circumstances due to ongoing fighting, over 10,000 people have been killed (nearly 3,000 of whom are civilians) and 1.2 million people lack proper access to food.
For them, the conflict is very real. People living in towns and villages within five kilometres of the Line of Contact witness an average of 40 fighting-related incidents per day. Over two thirds of those communities report daily or weekly shelling.
But, we are talking about human beings, not numbers. Human beings who have lived for the last four years without sufficient access to water, food, education or medical services, who have lost jobs and livelihoods. On top of all this, hundreds of thousands of human beings have been displaced, had their freedom of movement restricted due to the contact line and checkpoints and have lost family members and friends. But they still have hope, dreams and desires.
People in Need’s team visited several families living along the last active frontline in Europe. Watch the video, PageFlow or StoryMap to see what it is like to live in a conflict zone that has disappeared from newspaper headlines but is not forgotten by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations and its humanitarian partners on the ground.
