Refugees in Ukraine – Life Goes On

The war in Ukraine has driven thousands of people to flee their homes. Many have ended up in refugee camps and know they can never return to their old homes and lives. How can they manage with that stark reality, asks Yuliana Romanyshyn in this story, Life Goes On, written for Spiegel Online as part of her New Diplomacy Journalism Fellowship. Yuliana is a journalist with the Kyiv Post, who spent five weeks as part of her fellowship working with Spiegel Online in Hamburg, Germany.

There are more than 1.6 million internally displaced persons who have fled from war-torn Eastern Ukraine to other parts of Ukraine, alongside around 900,000 that fled to Russia, and smaller numbers to Belarus and EU countries. Seven refugee camps in Ukraine have been set up by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) on behalf of Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development (BMZ).

Yuliana's report, published on 16 January 2017, includes interviews with refugees from Donbas at a GIZ-run camp in Kharkiv, and the report includes data visualisation tracking the movements of refugees, as well as photographs from the camps by her Kyiv Post colleague, Anastasia Vlasova.