Leaving Donetsk, July 2014. (c) Dmitry Lovetsky / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.A friend who moved to Kyiv from Luhansk showed me a photograph recently. She’d written a caption underneath it: “Spot the refugee”.
The photo showed six children — two of them holding yellow and blue balloons — at nursery on 1 September, the day children start back to school. One of the children was my friend’s son. It was a new nursery school for him, and it was next to their new apartment. This new home had not been easy to find. One of the reasons for this was the family’s status as internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Since the outbreak of conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, more than two million people have been displaced from their homes. Finding new homes, jobs, schools and generally making life continue has been hard for these people, and reception of them outside of the conflict zone has been mixed. In April, Kyiv’s International Institute of Sociology conducted a poll of people’s attitudes to resettlers from Donbas and Crimea. The results were relatively positive, ranging from 35% in the west of the country through 45% in the centre and south to 47% in the east. And 83% of respondents had not changed their views over the last two years.
