Since the escalation of the war in February 2022, until mid-October 2024, nearly 6.8 million refugees4 from Ukraine have been recorded – 92 per cent of them in Europe. Inside Ukraine, an estimated 3.6 million people5 remain internally displaced as of October 2024.
Among the most vulnerable are also an estimated 12.6 million as of March 2025 people who were not displaced from their homes but who have been directly affected by the war – they have been wounded, their homes have been destroyed, their family members died.
Civilian infrastructure, such as power grids, water supply networks. hospitals transportation infrastructure, have been targeted by the daily missile attacks, severely disrupting people’s lives across the whole country, and particularly in the East.
20.06.2022
On World Refugee Day 2022, reach out to those most in need – including in Ukraine
Mrs Maria sits on her favourite bench, so polished from use that the seat looks like it is made of marble, not oak planks. You can see that she used to spend her days here, with a view of the neighbouring farms in front of her and her field behind her – something to be proud of. The village was her whole world. Now the only thing left for the 85-year-old woman is this bench. Everything she had was destroyed by the Russians. With tears in her eyes, she shows us where the kitchen was, where the bedroom was…. Everything is now a heap of rubble. Maria had to flee and now she has nothing to go back to. “I have nowhere to sleep, and the field where the vegetables should already be growing is littered with mines.”
More than 100 million people around the world are currently unable to live where their home is. This is an all-time record number, which not only today, on World Refugee Day, should draw our attention to the fact that something alarming is happening.
The number of refugees and internally displaced people is affected by wars, including the one in Ukraine, and by climate change, which leads to crop failures, droughts, floods and, ultimately, famine. Numbers have no names, no faces and no life stories. It is easy to work with them, making analyses and forecasts, but these 100 million people are very real people. Real people like Maria, who has spent her whole life in the village of Teterivske, 100 km from Kiev, in the worst possible direction – to the north-west, near the border with Belarus. This is where the Russian army came through at the beginning of March. They destroyed everything here.
Mrs Maria regularly receives help from us in the form of food parcels and basic necessities. Our aid also reaches refugees in Greece, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo every day. None of us would want to be in their situation. None of them wants to be in it either.
We meet these people. There is fear and doubt in their eyes. They can no longer count only on themselves. They are counting heavily on us. And thanks to you, we can reach out to them. Join us and do something good for them!
30.01.2024
Smart Charity – Using Technology to Make a Difference The usage and expenses related to new technologies have dominated the business world, and this trend extends to non-profit organizations. What technological solutions are used in non-profit organizations? What are the characteristics of Smart Charity? Smart Charity is a new concept describing a modern and agile […]
12.06.2023
To our questions about estimated casualty numbers, the most common answer is: “A lot! On both sides!”. Exactly how many no one knows, because getting aid to the occupied territories is like asking the aggressor for an open day in his trenches. On the 11th of June, the Russians fired on a boat with civilians […]
02.05.2023
What if this was your neighbourhood? If, between the billowing smoke, you spotted the ruins of the grocery store where you had shopped since you were a child? To which your mother would still send you with a list written in pencil on a piece of paper so you wouldn’t forget anything? Bachmut had more […]
